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The 

469 Ultra-Fashionables 

of America 




Qjm<^^^yc-^7hkk^ 



The 469 

Ultra-Fashionables 
of America 

A Social 
Guide Book and Register 
TO Date 

BY 
C. W. DE Lyon Nichoixs W^^ ^^T^ 

Governor-General of the National Society of 
Scions of Colonial Cavaliers 

Author of 

"The Ultra-Fashionable Peerage of America,'* 

"The Greek Madonna," "The Decadents," 

"The Art-History Primer," etc. 



BROADWAY PUBLISHING CO. 

835 BROADWAY NEW YORK 

1912 






Copyright, 1912 

BY 

Broadway Publishing Co. 



X:c.\ ^^^ 9 1 no 



CONTENTS 

Chapter I. 

PAGE 
How to Become Ultra-Fashionable 9 

Chapter II. 
The White House and the Ultra-Fashion- 
able Set — List of Washington Ultra- 
Fashionables 45 

Chapter III. 
Philadelphia Ultra-Fashionables , 52 

Chapter IV. 
Baltimore Ultra-Fashionables 58 

Chapter V. 
Boston Ultra-Fashionables 63 

Chapter VI. 
Providence Ultra-Fashionables 66 

Chapter VII. 
San Francisco and Chicago Ultra-Fashion- 
ables 69 

Chapter VIII. 
Newport 73 

Chapter IX. 
"The 300," The Innermost Circle of New 
York and Newport Society 92 

Chapter X. 
The Misadventures of Mrs. Detrimental — 
A Social Career loi 



PREFACE 

The gentle or irate reader of these pages is 
forewarned not to expect from them a genealogi- 
cal treatise. The subject in hand — National 
Society — is treated wholly from the standpoint 
of fashion; birth and hereditary rank being ac- 
counted accidents and not belonging to the essence 
of smartness. Furthermore^ the system of dis- 
tinctions employed in ''The Ultra-Fashionables y' 
sweeps away as so much social undercrust more 
than ninety per cent, of the oldest families of 
the Republic, On the other hand, a truly Amer- 
ican spirit pervading the work, evinces itself in 
the large measure of influence it assigns to the 
social talent of the individual as one of the main 
factors in insuring the highest social success. 

Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess 
of Connaughfs recent visit as guests of our Am- 
bassador to the Court of St. James, the Hon. 
Whitelaw Reid and Mrs, Reid, at their town house 
in this city, did more in a practical way, towards 
helping to outline Who^s Who in idtra-fashionable 
New York than any nexus of social events since 
Mrs. A stores famous ball to the 600 in 1903, for 
which invitations to members of society in Wash- 
ington and other cities were also included, thus 
creating a national tdtra-fashionable set of 600. 

The idea, however, of ushering in a new social 
7 



dynasty can by no means be construed as a major 
or minor premise underlying the invitation lists 
of the various functions given by the Whitelaw 
Reids and Mrs. Ogden Mills in honor of the Duke 
and Duchess of Connaught and the Princess 
Patricia. Discounting additions made for United 
States government and civic officials, the roll 
d'honeur for these entertainments, was in substance, 
closely similar to that of Mrs. Ogden Mills. A 
large proportion of the social personages heralded 
in the grand list of *'The 300'' in this work were 
guests at the aforesaid fetes to visiting Royalty. 
While this latter list of ''The 300^' is set forth in 
these pages as representative rather than as a 
numerical whole of Metropolitan ultra-smart so- 
ciety, the lists of the Ultra-Fashionables of the 
provincial cities are practically exhaustive. 

*'The Ultra-Fashionables of America^* is, in a 
sense, a greatly altered second edition of the 
author's book, ''The Ultra-Fashionable Peerage 
of America,'^ which was published privately in 
1904, and won the commendation of Mrs. Astor 
as a pen-picture of her coterie in American society, 
and at the other horn of the social dilemna, was 
quoted at some length by Henry George, Jr., in 
his work, "The Menace of Privilege J* The 
former title, "Ultra-Fashionable Peerage,*^ was 
liable to the misconception of meaning a display 
of American heraldry and pedigrees, instead of 
an anthology of the fin fleur of fashion. 

The Author 



The 

469 Ultra-Fashionables 

of America 

CHAPTER I 

HOW TO BECOME ULTRA- 
FASHIONABLE 

Newport, not the White House, is the su- 
preme court of social appeals in the United 
States. Mrs. Ogden Mills, and not the wife 
of the President of the United States, is the 
first lady of the land in the realm of fashion. 
In Europe the pleasures of social life are the 
privileges of rank, which of course is founded 
upon the Brahmin caste of nobility. 

In America, in ultra-fashionable society, 
rank has to be created and kept up by social 
functions, these amenities of necessity being 
extended to people already bearing the im- 
primatur of fashion, or meet for elevation to 

9 



r 



t o UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

the golden caste of Vera de Vere. One's 
family fixed one's social status under the old- 
time social regime in America. A European 
upper class finds in society in general and 
particularly in Summer migratory residence 
a relaxation, a surcease from care and worry. 
The ultra-fashionable American, on the con- 
trary, finds in society a treadmill from which 
there is no shuffling out; the giving and at- 
tending of a round of social functions which 
cannot be neglected without imperilling, or, 
more often actually losing caste. 

A good way to judge a faith is to have pro- 
fessed it and abandoned it. And society may 
well be viewed askant for a moment by one 
who at least in popular conception is the polar 
opposite to its spirit. I refer to a personage 
of world-wide repute, who, born in both the 
metropolitan and New England purple and 
in her youth a much-courted belle and heiress, 
forsook society's portals years ago, carving 
out for herself instead the career of the most 
eminent female financier, a name to con- 
jure with by every great corporation in the 
world — Mrs. Hetty Rowland Robinson 
Green. 



OF AMERICA ii! 

Mrs. Green, while frankly avowing that 
^^the social game is not worth the candle," 
regards the supremacy of Newport in Ameri- 
can society simply as an axiom questioned only 
by the hopelessly provincial. "If I went to 
Newport," Mrs. Green says, "I would take a 
cottage and entertain. I would not stop at 
a place which is a cross between a boarding- 
house and a hotel and be a hanger-on. What 
I do, I do with my might. When I dress, I 
dress with my might. If I should choose to 
go dressed like a charwoman the rest of the 
time, that is my own affair; I certainly would 
not be and am not making an attempt 
and failing in it. When I gave a large 
dinner at the Plaza, a year or two ago, 
to pay off my daughter Sylvia's social debts, 
I ordered the best dinner the Plaza could cater, 
with the Tiffany gold dinner service and the 
^pyramids of the Andes' for decorations. As 
for myself, I have had my fling at society in 
my day, along with our old neighbors in New 
York — the Rhinelanders, Jays, Grinnells, As- 
pinwalls, Langdons, Pells and Astors. Those 
were good, old, substantial families, different 
from the flashy new-rich people of to-day. 



12 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

Besides, my father took me to Saratoga season 
after season, and in Boston society, I was well 
acquainted with the Thayers, the Sturgis, the 
Harrison Gray Otis and the Bates families. 
After my marriage to Mr. Green we saw a 
good deal of the English nobility in London, 
where we lived at the time we had financial 
interests with the Baring Brothers. But since 
that time I have had more serious matters than 
society to attend to — to keep the solemn 
charge my father made me on his deathbed, 
to increase the fortune he left me. Now I 
keep a good supply of mourning cards, with 
wide borders on, although Mr. Green has 
been dead for years, and whenever social in- 
vitations come for me I have my daughter 
enclose one of these mourning cards. If people 
are going to move in society nowadays they 
must keep hard at work over it and give social 
entertainments night and day." 

But to go more fully into the minutiae of 
how to become ultra-fashionable. A marriage 
outright into the smart set — such, for exam- 
ple, as the Livingston Beekman-Thomas, the 
Suffern Tailer-Brown, or the more recent 
Townsend Burden, Jr. - Sheedy, Burden- 



OF AMERICA 13 

Dows and Astor - Force matrimonial alli- 
ances — is far and away the surest method of 
effecting an entrance into it. But one's whole 
family must not be unloaded upon the smart 
set at one upheaval. 

Since the death of Mrs. Astor, and from a 
complexity of causes, the power of money has 
asserted itself as never before in society's some- 
what checkered history. Another expeditious 
scheme, then, for making a breach in society's 
walls of exclusiveness is by means of a business 
deal benefitting one or more members of the 
smart set — not a hard cash bargaining for so- 
cial promotion, although men have been 
known to form business partnerships for this 
express object. But to illustrate from actual 
life: a short time ago a railroad transaction 
secured admission for a family of social aspi- 
rants into an influential section of the "magic 
circle." There are delicate ways of conveying 
the expression of one's social needs, and the 
ultra-smart are endowed with a fine sense of 
noblesse oblige, provided one is manipulating 
events so as to fill their purses. However, at- 
tractive personality and a measure of good 
breeding, and, above all, extraordinary tact, 



14 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

must be assumed as a major premise in these 
somewhat blind financial tactics. 

An annually increasing quota of candidates 
for metropolitan social honors, or rather 
adoption, is made up of rich — suddenly rich — 
Western or Pittsburg people. Such a family, 
we will premise, is about to establish itself in a 
New York City town house. If you are so- 
cially ambitious, do not set up your domicile 
on the upper west side, but fix your abode 
as near as possible to "Millionaires' Row" — 
the Fifth Avenue court end of Central Park — 
not necessarily an unduly ostentatious house, 
which will tgg everyone on to asking the 
dread question, "Who is Who?" but letting 
the show place come a few years later, after 
you are well placed socially. A grandiose 
house on a conspicuous thoroughfare, with no 
suitable guests to fill it, like the gigantic edi- 
fices of the Bank of Italy and Ministry of 
Finance in Rome, is an exclamation point 
strongly provocative of irony. 

Apropos of living in apartments: To-day a 
Park Avenue apartment, located between Six- 
tieth and Seventy-second Streets, for example, 
is far more fashionable than a whole high- 



OF AMERICA 15 

stoop brownstone house of the last generation, 
with its gloomy and forbidding entrance, 
its morgue and sarcophagus drawing-room 
effects and its gauche appointments for enter- 
taining. Lease a Park Avenue apartment, if 
you choose, or live at the Gotham, the St. 
Regis or the Ritz-Cariton in Winter, annex- 
ing, if you can, to your possessions a Long 
Island or Tuxedo country house, to be kept 
open through most of the cold months for 
week-ends. 

At all events, your household gods, suitably 
enshrined, having taken technical advice on 
the furnishings on every point — for I once 
saw a chaise lunge^ meant for use only in a 
lady's boudoir, foisted in upon the centre of 
a reception room by a social novice — employ 
a press agent; but be wary of too much pub- 
licity, for in the main the role of inglorious 
obscurity is the one you will need to play until 
you know the ropes better. At the same time, 
you can afford to pay the press agent well for 
having it inserted in the personal columns of 
a big daily which caters to fashionable folk, 
that you sail for Europe on such a date, or 
have returned from your country house for 



1 6 UL TRA'FASHIONABLES 

the season; so that, at least, yourself or your 
social sponsors will not be hampered by per- 
sons protesting, ^'I have never heard of those 
people." 

A special phase of newspaper publicity to 
be particularly wary of is that involved in 
allowing the women of your family to be en- 
rolled as members of certain clubs and chari- 
ties, and having their names bundled out in 
the third-class society columns of a certain 
Sunday paper, with lists of "detrimentals"* 
of the first water, numbers of them turning 
out to be veritable millstones hung about the 
neck of social aspiration. A woman of fashion 
and a clubwoman are two mutually excluding 
entities — two totally distant creations of 
Almighty God, although the latter often tries 
to palm herself oE for the former. 



*A "detrimental" Is a technical New York 
society term Invented by Mrs. Van Rensselaer 
Cruger, the novelist par excellence of American 
ultra-fashionable life. In this monograph a 
"detrimental" means a person of however ex- 
cellent moral character or ability, who does not 
blend well socially with either the conservative 
Knickerbocker element, or the ultra-fashionables. 



OF AMERICA 17 

The old saying that it takes two generations 
to make a gentleman is being refuted every 
day, for American men are remarked not only 
for their facility in amassing fortunes, but in 
furnishing themselves with presentable man- 
ners on comparatively short notice. It is more 
particularly in women of plebeian birth that 
vulgarity is such an obstinate factor to eradi- 
cate. If your early training in drawing-room 
deportment has been defective or wholly lack- 
ing — and as likely as not it has — place your- 
self at once under a social mentor. Have her 
put the society intonation for a speaking voice 
into your throat; teach you easy deportment 
and carriage; how to enter and leave a draw- 
ing-room, and how to converse with the latest 
society badinage. To illustrate these points 
from the highest fashion and from the case of 
one who has had the advantages of birth: few 
society women have been as close students of 
Delsarte as Mrs. Burke-Roche. The art of 
fencing as an adjuvant to comely figures, for 
example, was extensively practiced during 
this last Newport season by Mrs. Oliver 
Gould Jennings, Mrs. Leonard M. Thomas 
{nee Blanche Oelrichs), Mrs. Reginald Van- 



1 8 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

derbilt and Mrs. Lorillard Spencer, Jr. If 
women who have been for years well placed 
socially work so hard over themselves to be 
formed and cultivated on certain lines, it is 
doubly needful for an aspirant. 

The next move for the social aspirant will 
be to cultivate the acquaintance of some fash- 
ionable woman whose finances are on the 
wane, but whose temperament requires the 
expenditure of large sums of money and who 
is, moreover, a walking American De Brett 
and Burke — in short, a running commentary 
as to knowing who are the people one can re- 
ceive. Sedulously beware, however, of any 
society woman whose exchequer has become 
so depleted that she has acquired any notoriety 
as a social promoter, because then the game is 
all over save for the lampoons in public print 
at your social cost. Conceding that introduc- 
tions may be sparingly given by a suitably 
chosen social promoter, her help will in a 
negative way be of much value in warding off 
^'detrimentals," thus saving you years of un- 
doing and weeding out. 

When one pauses to reflect upon the vast 
fund of energy, time and money annually ex- 



OF AMERICA 19 

pended in New York City by social aspirants 
in entertaining the wrong people — people 
who are positive dragons besetting the path 
of social progress, these foregoing monitions 
cannot be too often reiterated. 

Form the acquaintance of an occasional 
visiting nobleman, if fully assured he is not 
an impostor, and stands well at his consulate 
and is likely to be received by families who 
might, perhaps, be made to fall in line, for 
furthering your campaign. Minister well to 
his gastronomic needs, for more than likely 
he has taken lodgings sans meals. But avoid 
making yourself unduly conspicuous in public 
print with such people of title, for should any 
one of them turn out to be a scapegrace, the 
satirical periodicals will show you up as a 
nobody caught in the flagrante delictu of snob- 
bishness and hanging on by the eyebrows. 

If, on the other hand, a titled European is 
comfortably wealthy and persona grata at 
houses of the highest fashion, secure the honor 
of his presence, if only for a single night, as 
a guest for your opera box, no matter if he 
passes the greater part of the evening calling 
on friends outside in the '^golden horseshoe," 



20 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

not being seen once in your loge between acts 
when the lights are turned on. Of course your 
social mentor has explained to you that there 
is no greater social reinforcement than the pos- 
session of a box at the opera. But be not over- 
sanguine, and do not waste undue time 
and efifort over this highly accredited noble- 
man unless you have on the tapis a marriage- 
able daughter with an ample dot, for in all 
probabihty he will flout you as soon as he has 
ascertained your exact social status. 

The snubs, cuffs and slings of outrageous 
fortune you are experiencing on every hand 
may be perverting you into a woman hater and 
a cynic, when your youth and beauty are at 
their zenith; but keep up a bold front, steering 
clear of flamboyant toilettes, for a woman 
needs to be astonishingly well placed socially 
to dress like a cocotte. To lay aside all persi- 
flage, many a social aspirant has handicapped 
herself by being habitually overdressed. To 
draw from life: A pretty and in some ways 
tactful postulant for social entree attended one 
Lenten morning a sewing guild of the great 
metropolitan Cathedral of St. John the 
Divine, In the presence of a bevy of social 



OF AMERICA 21 

leaders dressed in simple, sober tone, as be- 
fitted the season of penitence in a religious 
house, Mrs. Would-Be flounced in lavishly 
bejeweled and attired in an elaborate tailored 
costume of white broadcloth! The efforts of 
the influential social sponsor who accompa- 
nied Mrs. Would-Be were of course rendered 
of no avail, for upon their crossing the thresh- 
old of the guildroom a painfully suppressed 
smile went round as if by electric unison. 

And above all, be philanthropic with your 
purse, although, perhaps, the heart responds 
but feebly. But let one of the special forms 
of your altruism be giving social functions, a 
goodly quota of the guests, until you are well 
placed, consisting of old Colonial and Knick- 
erbocker families, who may never be able to 
return your hospitality in kind, but each of 
whom may know a few ultra-fashionables. 
Anent of philanthropy, conditions have 
changed a great deal since William D. How- 
ells wrote his "Travels in Altruria," and fash- 
ionable charities as an adjuvant to social 
climbing, are growing more difficult to be 
worked, and the church still more intractable 
to be hoodwinked for these ends. The last 



2 2 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

generation's perversion of a church into a 
social club, by means of which to effect an 
entrance into society, is wholly alien to twen- 
tieth century metropolitan trend of events. 
The newly rich are no longer marrying their 
daughters to clergymen, for supposed social 
position — in fact, the church and fashion are 
constantly drifting wider apart, much to the 
spiritual purification of the former. 

A novelist of society, like Robert W. Cham- 
bers, despite his cleverness, depicts a social 
aspirant as donating a large cheque to the 
bishop, to further his social ascent, and its 
being the talk of the clubs. A mondaine such 
as Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, who is to-day 
and always has been an active factor in ultra- 
fashionable life at home and abroad, would 
not think of committing such an anachronism 
in one of her novels. The ultra-smart set 
frame of mind with reference to the church is 
set forth in caricature by Mrs. Wharton in 
The House of Mirth, when she cites Mrs. 
Trenor, the leader of fashion in her novel, and 
hostess of a week-end house party, as saying: 
^'You know, we have to have the Bishop once 
a year. I always have had bad luck about the 



OF AMERICA 23 

Bishop's visits. Last year when he came Gus 
forgot all about his being here and brought 
home the Ned Wintons and the Parleys — five 
divorces and six sets of children between 
them!" 

In the ultra-smart set, then in London, and 
in New York and Newport, what with Satur- 
day night dances ending at three o'clock in the 
morning of the Lord's Day; what with Sun- 
day motoring, country club lunching, golfing, 
yachting and bridge, the breach away from 
the church is deepening and widening every 
day. The clergy have almost disappeared 
from fashion's invitation lists, and are being 
remanded by its votaries to their rightful 
spiritual province — the functions of baptiz- 
ing, burying and marrying them; provided 
the latter ceremony does not for statutory rea- 
sons have to be performed by a civil magis- 
trate. One must not, however, form the 
perverse notion that there do not exist in the 
ultra-fashionable set whole groups of devout 
communicants of churches, as well as philan- 
thropists. 

The Episcopal Church and the Catholic 
Church are the churches of beautiful man- 



24 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

ners, and if your birth has placed you under 
the ban of being a dissenter, cultivate Epis- 
copal emotions and shuffle off the mortal coil 
of Presbyterianism on as short notice as pos- 
sible. AfTect the church with a hierarchy, if 
only for the subjective effect it will have upon 
your manners. Ralph Waldo Emerson said 
no truer thing in his English Traits than that 
*'You can tell a dissenter by his manners!" 
You can divine that some women were not 
born in the church by their smile. 

If one is blessed with young daughters, no 
matter what one's creed, hurry them away to 
a French convent for a while, for a convent 
is a school of respect, a nursery of beautiful 
manners, inculcating what always makes a 
young woman doubly attractive to mankind — 
the subjection of women. To see convent-bred 
manners in their flower and fruition, one 
really needs to know the delightful society of 
the continent of Europe. For your daughters' 
finishing choose the most fashionable metro- 
politan schools, entertaining your daughter's 
schoolmates, i. e., those from fashionable fami- 
lies, lavishly and often, for there is no more 
unerring entering wedge than thus winning 



OF AMERICA 25 

over their parents to your Napoleonic cam- 
paign of the social allied powers. 

Do not, I beg of you, turn yourself and 
family into a national one-night stand theatre 
comique, by making the grand tour of hiring 
cottages at Newport, Lenox and the other 
modish resorts, before society has given the 
slightest recognition to your claims to be 
passed upon. Invoke the aid of old Father Nep- 
tune; secure a yacht, as sumptuous a one as you 
please, and, socially speaking, if your bark 
sink, 'tis to another sea. If ignored or snubbed 
at Newport, spread sail for Narragansett Pier 
or Bar Harbor, felicitating yourself that the 
social thud is not barbed with the added 
poignancy of one's having been a cottager in 
a place and not being received. Furthermore, 
there is no more acceptable mode of entertain- 
ing and of putting people under heavy obliga- 
tions than the ownership of yachts and opera 
boxes. 

During this, the period of your social rein- 
carnation, go abroad early and stay late, stop- 
ping at Claridge's or the Ritz. What is a 
paltry two hundred and fifty dollars a day for 
a suite of rooms on the sixth floor of an hotel 



26 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

in the heart of Mayfair, where kings and 
queens, emperors and princes of the royal 
blood of all nations have stayed? Or there is 
another suite on the second floor which a 
crown prince occupied at four hundred and 
fifty dollars a day. Contact with the great 
world of Europe will ennoble your manners, 
imparting an air of distinction and greater 
confidence in approaching the fin fleur of 
your own countrymen's society. 

As your sojourn in England may be some- 
what lengthy, you must have your own private 
carriages, and it is infra dig to be seen so often 
without crest or coat-of-arms on your panels 
during the crush in Bond Street at four 
o'clock. Then hie away down to the Royal 
College of Heralds in Queen Victoria Street, 
where one of your compatriots the other day 
paid the last of a series of fees, piling up to 
nearly two thousand dollars, for crest, motto 
and emblazoned coat-of-arms. 

We will give you the credit of not trying to 
tamper with the Lord Chamberlain's office 
for the coveted bit of pasteboard which will 
admit one to the state balls and concerts at 
Buckingham Palace, for which as high as ten 



OF AMERICA 27 

thousand dollars has been paid a conniving 
peeress by an American Croesus. Besides a 
box for the royal opera at Covent Garden, 
with Lucullan feasts at the Ritz or Carlton 
afterwards, you may charter far in advance 
a commodious houseboat for the Cowes re- 
gatta, to say nothing of musicales to be given 
with grand opera artists, whose services com- 
mand high in the thousands. 

It is assumed that you have secured from 
the start for the London campaign the services 
of a high-class social promoter; such a person- 
age, by judicious management, can be cor- 
ralled from the ranks of the nobility, numbers 
of these bearers of titles among the women 
being sub rosa in some form of commission 
business. An English lady has not the same deli- 
cacy that an American society woman needing 
money has, for rendering social service for a 
financial consideration. Arrange with your 
social promoter to have a dinner given in your 
name at your hotel, in honor of an eminent 
peeress, with covers laid for no other Ameri- 
cans besides yourselves, and see that the event 
is given the widest exploiting it will warrant 
on both sides of the Atlantic. 



2 8 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

In London society then, it is the smart court 
circle for which you are supposed to be aim- 
ing. A court presentation, while in itself 
almost indispensable, cannot give one open 
sesame into this charmed circle. After your 
English visiting list warrants it, you may elect 
to lease a country house, say, on the Thames. 
The barrister who draws up the agreement, 
the inventory taker, the butler, the footman, 
the coachman, the grooms, the stablemen, 
housemaids, parlor maids, the buttons — every- 
one fastens on you like a cavalcade of Nea- 
politan lazzaroni, to make an extra bit, and 
the plucking of the American golden goose 
makes the laughter long and loud in the ser- 
vants' hall. 

The management of the servants' hall alone 
in a large English country establishment re- 
quires the tact of an angel, the law of prece- 
dence being carried out just as punctiliously 
as with the titled guests above stairs. The 
kitchen sits in judgment of the drawing-room 
far more rigorously than if an English hostess 
were the mistress of the manse. Only skilled 
labor is possible to run such a house, for per- 
fection of service is demanded by your exact- 



OF AMERICA 



29 



ing British guests and no leniency is shown 
in case of mistakes. The country house which 
has fully forty bedrooms to be of any size in 
England, is run like a small hotel and costs so 
much to keep up — the food for the servants' 
quarters alone would suffice for several poor 
families — that the houseboat and motor 
launches for the river are reckoned among the 
minor expenses. 

The more quiet and conservative guests are 
to be bidden for the midweek house parties; 
the gayer element, of which there are more 
men, often numbering forty or fifty people in 
all, are invited for the week-end. But ever 
and anon the American hostess who is a novice 
will find to her dismay that A sharp is 
amusing herself at the expense of B flat. Still 
be mindful of the reflection that every annoy- 
ing feature of this British ordeal has its uses 
toward fitting one for an American social ca- 
reer, even if one meets few American ultra- 
fashionables, while performing these social 
labors of Hercules. Go to Paris every year 
to buy clothes; frequent occasionally some of 
the celebrated spas on the Continent fre- 
quented by royalty, stopping invariably at 



30 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

hotels; lease houses only in London or in fash- 
ionable country home localities of England. 
If during your European sojourns you fall in 
with fashionable Americans, try by delicate 
and becoming advances to ingratiate yourself 
with them, leaving it entirely to them to take 
the initiative of keeping up the acquaintance 
on American soil. Sedulously avoid even the 
semblance of future building upon them, or 
banking upon the name. In your conversations 
with American ultra-fashionables, although 
the major part of their talk among themselves 
is about people, be wary of indulging in per- 
sonalities yourself and keep to objective 
themes — the opera, the plays, the modes, any- 
thing — and hold yourself well in hand, never 
showing the slightest eagerness, if great names 
in society chance to drop from ultra-fashion- 
able lips. Never deign to ask for introduc- 
tions to those better placed socially. 

During this, the trying-on time for your 
royal American progress, whether abroad or 
at home, you must accept with true Christian 
resignation the truth of the major premise that 
you yourself are not worth meeting, and ac- 
cordingly as many of your dinners and musi- 



OF AMERICA 31: 

cales as possible — you are to give musicales 
instead of receptions — must have as a social 
piece de resistance a guest of honor. And as 
it will be an affront to the guest of- honor, if 
those of her friends bidden do not grace your 
house with their presence, there you are with 
a number of smart people meshed in the toils 
of a very effectual form of polite coercion. 
The guest of honor subterfuge works equally 
well for a family which has held high position 
and is on the down grade socially. A debu- 
tante or lately betrothed young girl is the most 
suitable and unsuspecting guest of honor to 
subserve such an end. 

As your Winters are to be passed in New 
York, where the real battle for social accept- 
ancy has to be fought out — Newport will 
come much later — strictly avoid sending out 
cards for general reception days for the sea- 
son, or for a series of any length of informal 
afternoons at home with music, for undesir- 
able persons and social mountebanks are sure 
to take undue advantage of such loopholes. 
Be at home on Sunday afternoons to serve tea 
at five o'clock, from Horse Show time and the 
opening of the opera in November, until your 



32 ULTRA-FASHION ABLES 

Spring exodus to Paris to buy clothes en route 
for the London season. Issue no cards for 
Sunday afternoons, having it given out that 
those of your friends whom you really desire 
to have come are bidden by verbal invitation, 
and that you receive only a few. Give no lati- 
tude to the bringing of extra guests without 
your explicit consent; in this respect be as arbi- 
trary as if you were a classic Corinthian pillar 
of society. There are so many people whom 
it is a pleasure and an honor to receive, who 
have one or two acquaintances of practically 
no social standing, but bound to them by some 
tie of self interest, who will beg and importune 
them to be brought to the house of a wealthy 
social aspirant for self-seeking ends really not 
at all complimentary to the hostess. 
(^ Should it during your period of social pro- 
bation be your good fortune — and your wealth 
will act as a lure — to receive an invitation to 
the church for a wedding in a really fashion- 
able family, for which invitations have been 
sent out by the thousands, make a costly and 
artistic wedding present. For example, give 
a pair of handsome candelabra. Few wedding 
gifts, aside from cheques, which can be given 



OF AMERICA 33 

only by relatives or exceedingly old friends 
of a family, are more acceptable than candle- 
sticks, which are always in fashion and can 
be disposed in such a variety of places and in 
cozy nooks about a house. 

More than likely your munificent wedding 
gift will receive mention in the newspapers 
through the kind offices of society reporters 
whom your husband has treated to champagne 
galore, and one or two of whom have perhaps 
already shown their gallantry by inserting 
your name in their columns among lists of 
guests at smart entertainments, at which you 
were neither present in the body nor honored 
with an invitation. At all events, the general 
public, which is hot-headed, and some very 
conventional society matrons of high degree, 
who could not conceive of such a ruse, upon 
reading of your somewhat extravagant wed- 
ding gift will jump at the conclusion that you 
were of course bidden to the reception. Fur- 
thermore, from time to time, much coveted 
bits of pasteboard for other church weddings 
are more than likely to follow suite. This 
clever little strategem was resorted to at New- 
port by a family of long-suffering social pro- 



34 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

bationers from Providence, who were invited 
to the church for the Oelrichs-Martin wed- 
ding, a few years ago, and to this day is yield- 
ing a good bonus in social per cents. 

The classic Greek aphorism, ''Know thy- 
self," must in your case as often be reversed. 
The reverse side of the medal, ''Know your 
people," must alike be your mental and social 
watchword. Many a social probationer pos- 
sessed of the wealth of Ormus or of Ind 
seems to be devoid of a conception of the 
meaning of what is termed "family," or gentle 
birth, and the advantages accruing from such 
a high estate, granting that the composition 
of the structure of fashionable society is rela- 
tively two-thirds made up of wealth. 

It is assumed then that you have all along 
been a close student of fashionable society and 
have perceived that there are only two sets 
in society with which a really ambitious per- 
son can afford to have anything to do — the 
smart set and its outward fringe and the old 
Colonial and Knickerbocker families. I speak 
advisedly of the latter, for should one finally 
not succeed in penetrating into the true ultra- 
smart inner circle, the defeat can be partially 



OF AMERICA 35 

cloaked by falling back upon the Knicker- 
bockers. And their names at every stadium 
of the upward climb up society's toilsome hill 
will pose well in the newspapers along with 
those whom you perchance may be able to 
muster for your dinners and musicales. In 
general, whenever you receive a social thud 
from an ultra-fashionable, fly into the arms of 
a Knickerbocker. 

Among Knickerbockers and Colonials there 
are of course varying degrees of fashionable 
validity, and I append herewith a partial list 
of those standing nearest the throne of ultra- 
smartness as an ideal goal to be aspired to, 
although in all probability one may have to 
rest content for a long time with the com- 
panionship of knights and ladies of much 
lower degree in the Knickerbocker peerage 
around one's festive board. 

Of Van Rensselaers, the Alexander Van 
Rensselaers, to whom Mrs. Edmund L. Bay- 
lies, Miss Alice Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Van 
Rensselaer-Johnson and the Alexander Van 
Rensselaers, of Philadelphia, belong, are of 
premier importance. Mrs. Edmund L. Bay- 
lies, nee Van Rensselaer, outranks the whole 



36 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

clan Van Rensselaer as the apogee of fashion; 
besides being the annual much-feted guest of 
the Bradley-Martins and the Earl and 
Countess of Craven. But do not, I pray you, 
be hypnotized by the name Van Rensselaer; 
separate carefully the Van Rensselaer chaff 
from the Van Rensselaer wheat, and if need 
be rebuke the arrogance of the clan by a gentle 
reminder that the first Van Rensselaer patroon 
was a tradesman when he came to America. 

Of the very wide ramifications of the Liv- 
ingston family tree the Maturin and Goodhue 
Livingstons, Miss Laura Livingston and one 
or two of the young Robert Livingstons are 
almost the only bearers of that ancient pat- 
ronymic who have kept up in the van of 
fashion to-day. The T. J. Oakley Rhineland- 
ers are the only ultra-fashionable Rhine- 
landers, and the Herbert C. Pells, Miss 
Charlotte Pell and the Stephen H. P. Pells 
are keeping propped up the somewhat waning 
social renown of the numerous Pell clan of 
manorial escutcheons. The death of Mr. and 
Mrs. Frederic J. de Peyster relegated the de 
Peysters pretty much to the social background, 
although Mr. Dongan de Peyster is a bit in 



OF AMERICA 37 

evidence. The Gallatins — a time-honored 
name, which was beginning to fall into social 
desuetude — is again coming to be associated 
with ultra-fashionable life, and Mr. R. Hor- 
ace Gallatin has lately purchased a villa at 
Newport. Of Hoffmans, a semi-obscure 
Dutch lineage m Colonial times and never 
until of late much identified with fashion, the 
Charles F. and Francis Burrall Hoffmans are 
the solitary representatives of their family de- 
creed ultra-fashionable. Charles F. Hoffman 
is a relative of Mrs. Elbridge T. Gerry, and 
the alliance proved helpful as an entering 
wedge into Newport society. The Gardiners, 
of the Manor of Gardiner's Island, have for 
society chiefly a reminiscent interest. Mr. 
Robert B. Van Cortlandt is almost single- 
handed in his efforts to keep up the social fame 
of that grand old manor family. 

The Winthrops, especially the Egerton L. 
jWinthrops; the Lorillards, the Livingston- 
Beeckmans, the E. N. Tailers and the Sufifern 
Tailers, the Newbold Morrises, the Schermer- 
horns, would all prove helpful, provided you 
can only get the presentations, which is not an 
easy matter. If you cannot deal with these 



3 8 UL TRA'FASHIONABLES 

principals, angle for their relations. Study 
the doings of society closely and which Knick- 
erbockers are enjoying any vogue or lead up 
to any will be readily apparent. At all haz- 
ards it is only well-bred people whom you can 
afford to receive in your drawing-room, and 
Knickerbockers and Colonials usually are 
blessed with a fair complement of the social 
graces. On the other hand, it is amazing how 
certain parvenus acquire such presentable 
manners on comparatively short notice; but 
possess them they must, no matter how tedious 
or humbling the technical drill, if they would 
move in ultra-fashionable society. It is only 
exceedingly well placed old social celebrities 
who can have the temerity to violate the 
convenances. 

Be wary and sly about it, but be willing 
to invest hundreds or a thousand dollars in 
having every nook and cranny of your own 
and your husband's pedigrees searched, and if 
you should light upon any presentable ances- 
try in this country — for Heaven's sake, don't 
go back to kings — you could confide the sur- 
prising discovery as old-time history, known 
for generations by your family, to an occa- 



OF AMERICA 39 

sional Knickerbocker acquaintance. But keep 
yourself well in hand and do not go to the 
extreme of running out to the Fourth Avenue 
shops and hanging the walls of your dining- 
room with counterfeit presentments of as- 
sumed ''ancestors." Also do not unmuzzle 
yourself on the forefather claim to any mem- 
ber of the smart set, unless you are not loath 
to be made a laughing stock. In general, few 
conversational faux pas lay bare one's plebeian 
social origin more glaringly than harping on 
one's lineage on short acquaintance with a 
person, or under any circumstances, with an 
Englishman, to whom all Americans alike are 
commoners. Treasure in memory the incident 
of the enormously rich social aspirant from 
the West who begged Bishop Potter for intro- 
ductions to several of Grace Church's most 
stiff-necked families, solely on the ground that 
her family "came over" with William the 
Conqueror. 

"That is most interesting, Madame," re- 
joined the courtly Bishop. "And, perhaps, you 
have a bar sinistre, too, somewhere back in 
your family tree." 

"A bar sinistre in our family; that is too 



40 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

good to be true. I shall run right up to Demp- 
sey & Carroll's and have them hunt up a bar 
sinistre for our family." 

Give a wide berth to Lenox, for it is a 
mincing, conservative and somewhat provin- 
cial colony, more or less dominated by Bos- 
ton ideas, and to most of whose members, 
although two-thirds of them live on estates, 
the genus social climber is as repellant as to 
the townsfolk of a strenuous, Puritan New 
England village. While the doors of New- 
port drawing-rooms readily swing wide open 
to such notable Lenox cottagers as the William 
Douglass Sloanes, the Bradhurst Osgood 
Fields, the Laniers, the Frank Sturgis, the 
Joseph Choates, the Newbold Morrises and 
a limited number of others, there is a goodly 
list of families moving in general society at 
Lenox not particularly significant for wealth, 
patrician lineage, or natural style, who would 
pass a tediously dull season were they to at- 
tempt Newport. The Charles Astor Bristeds 
owned cottages at both these resorts, but even 
they found their book of social engagements 
much fuller at Lenox than at Newport. To 
state the case from a somewhat different social 



OF AMERICA 41 

plane, one's being well received by general so- 
ciety at Lenox would be no guarantee of an 
enjoyable season at Newport, and it is New- 
port which is to be the acme of your social 
endeavors in America. Edith Wharton made 
a grave mistake when she sold Land's End at 
Newport and built the Mount at Lenox. 

Pay your first visit to Newport at the time 
of the national tennis tournament, which com- 
mences about the middle of August, having 
secured in advance a suite of rooms at the 
Muenchinger-King Cottage. Do your enter- 
taining mainly at Berger's, provided your 
guests do you credit in the public eye; other- 
wise, invite your friends en famille where you 
are stopping. Unless quite sure of your 
ground socially, do not tarry for the Newport 
Horse Show, the first week in September, for 
the boxes for the show, not being very numer- 
ous and glaringly in evidence, the question of 
Who's Who as to both the occupants and the 
callers at the boxes, is something drastic. 

As to the art of entertaining, procure imme- 
diately a volume of Ralph Pulitzer's book, 
New York Society on Parade, written from 
the inside by one who knows both his smart 



42 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

world and how to write. Aim also at origi- 
nality and the freshest European modes, and 
do not omit your prayers to old Father Nep- 
tune. For instance, if your Winter social 
campaigns warrant in a measure your leasing 
a cottage at Newport, put your yacht in com- 
mission and have it given out that although 
you have hired a commodious villa, you are 
so much of a sea dog that you are going to live 
aboard your yacht more than half of the time. 
If dinner invitations do not come pouring in 
as fast as you like, take frequent little cruises 
of a day or two on your yacht, having mention 
made in the newspapers by your publicity 
agent every time you get on or off your aquatic 
social motor. 

Suffer the horse, too, to help you along up 
the social hill of difficulty. Invest in a string 
of racehorses and be an exhibitor at the va- 
rious fashionable horse shows, provided your- 
self or your husband have a genuine and un- 
affected love of the horse. See what wonders 
the equine god has sometimes wrought for 
blue ribbon social probationers. Somewhat in 
sequence of this thought, contrast the list of 
guests bidden to the Hastings-Benedict nup- 



OF AMERICA 43 

tials in the Presbyterian Church at Greenwich 
not many years ago, with the ultra-smart en- 
tourage in which the Thomas Hastings are 
now moving. 

It must be borne in mind that if a social 
aspirant be a resident of any one of the provin- 
cial cities which have ultra-fashionable repre- 
sentation, such, for example, as Boston, Phila- 
delphia, Baltimore or Washington, similar 
lines of tactics as for New York City postu- 
lants obtain — above all, exerting oneself to 
affiliate with those denizens of these respective 
cities who have good social standing at New- 
port. 

In ^n^^ it is but a truism to reflect that the 
role of fifty per cent, of those now high and 
mighty in the national smart set has been 
essentially that of climbers. Not many years 
ago the family of a leading metropolitan spe- 
cialist in medicine, people well placed so- 
cially, sent out cards for a debutante's recep- 
tion for their handsome daughter. *^Now, I 
give you carte blanche for flowers, music, ca- 
terers and everything else to make Clara's 
debut a notable one, but I have one favor to 
beg and I must be peremptory about it," pater. 



44 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

familias insisted; ^'the So-and-So's must be 
invited." 

"Impossible!" His aristocratic wife threw 
up her hands in despair. "Those girls dress 
abominably, and the man is so untutored he 
can't even pronounce Fifth Avenue; he calls 
it Tit' Avenue." 

"But the man is a very lucrative patient of 
mine, with locomotor ataxia and he came 
around to my office this morning and told me 
he had read the notice of our reception in The 
Herald, and that his one ambition in life was 
for his family to get into society. And be- 
sides, you will give his wife the credit of doing 
a thinking part — of doing no talking at all. 
If a woman does not open her mouth, she cer- 
tainly does not expose her crudity." 

They were invited. Two of those "abomi- 
nably dressed girls" are at the present hour 
queening it not only in American, but in inter- 
national society; one of them the mother of a 
duchess prominent in the recent coronations, 
both allied to colossal fortunes of world-wide 
prestige, and one of them playing the hostess 
aboard her husband's yacht and at her own 
sweet will to the crowned heads of Europe. 



OF AMERICA 45 

CHAPTER II 
WASHINGTON 

The White House is powerless to create 
anyone ultra-fashionable. Unhke European 
courts, the White House and its immediate 
entourage stand in no integral relation to na- 
tional society. Mrs. Grover Cleveland, a 
provincial beauty, it is true, enjoyed a certain 
wide- reaching vogue, but Astor Court had not 
at that time risen to its full ascendancy and, 
in fact, the late Mrs. William Astor was not 
acclaimed the leader of national society until 
1902. At the opening of the twentieth cen- 
tury, and up to the time of her death, it was 
Mrs. Astor and not the wife of any one of the 
Presidents of the United States who was the 
most widely discussed American woman. 

To-day, in the realm of fashion, it is Mrs. 
Ogden Mills who takes precedence before the 
wife of the President of the United States. 
It is the answers to the questions how such 
national social cynosures as Mrs. Ogden Mills, 



4^ UL TRA-FASHWNABLES 

Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs. Stuyvesant 
Fish, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney and the 
Elbridge T. Gerry's live, dress and pass their 
time which decree the convenances for the 
ultra-fashionable. The President and the 
members of his family, no matter what their 
birth, previous social condition or personal 
qualifications, in common with the diplomats 
accredited to the various powers, sustain a 
quasi ex-officio relation to the ultra-smart set, 
or at least, to a section of it, if they choose to 
accept its invitations. Under the Roosevelt 
administration, which was the most brilliant 
social one in many terms of office of the na- 
tion's chief executives, the White House was 
frequented by the Ogden Mills, the Cornelius 
Vanderbilts, the Stuyvesant Fishes; in fact, 
by more ultra-fashionables than during any 
Presidential regime prior or subsequent. The 
line of comparative criticism between the 
Roosevelt and Taft social order of events at 
the national capital, which may have been 
erroneously imputed to the Baroness Hengel- 
muller, the wife of the Austrian Ambassador, 
at all events savored strongly of the truth. 
President Roosevelt, although by birth an 



OF AMERICA 47 

aristocrat, and himself and family much 
courted by the ultra-fashionable set, was not 
listed with it, for, on the other hand, he is a 
man of the people and it would have been 
distasteful to him to be explicitly aligned to 
the closest exclusion in the great republic. 
Miss Alice Roosevelt, the present Mrs. Nich- 
olas Longworth, invariably represented the 
President's family at Newport. Possessed of 
the savoir-faire and graces of manner which 
should become a daughter of the White 
House, she was repeatedly the guest of the 
Ogden Mills and the Cornelius Vanderbilts 
at Newport. 

Private levees at the White House have 
seldom been so vigilantly censored on moral 
grounds as under the Roosevelt and Taft ad- 
ministrations. And the former Miss Alice 
Roosevelt, in her father's Presidential term, 
carrying out the White House policy at New- 
port, administered a drastic and public snub- 
bing to a spectacular leader of society there 
who was one of the chief figures in a myste- 
rious and highly sensational scandal. 

The Taft Presidential social regime, while 
not stamped with the ultra - fashionable 



48 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

imprimatur of the Roosevelt era, is admir- 
ably conducted on official lines and prac- 
tically above criticism from the standpoint of 
good, broad Americanism. ^Washington so- 
ciety at best is such a tangled congeries of 
political, social, not to say business interests, 
cosmopolitan in one aspect and almost as pro- 
vincial as a New England village in another, 
and its more fashionable residents are so flit- 
ting and transient in their sojourn, that it is 
somewhat puzzling to a censor of ultra- 
fashionable conditions. Nevertheless, an ultra- 
fashionable set, irrespective of official life, 
exists at the national capital, and were our 
present Ambassador at the Court of St. James' 
to retire to Washington Mrs. Whitelaw Reid 
would at once be accorded the rank of its 
social leader. As to actual facts, in style of 
entertaining, the house and its appointments 
and in equipage, no one at the present hour is 
leading the ultra-fashionable life in Washing- 
ton in better form than the Perry Belmonts, 
and their popularity as host and hostess is 
steadily augmenting. 

Apropos of the John Hays Hammonds, 
their status in the ultra-fashionable set has 



OF AMERICA 49 

been for the most part official, in connection 
with the Coronation Ambassadorship, while 
in private life they had never been identified 
with it to any appreciable extent, Mrs. Ham- 
mond having previously been known more as 
a clubwoman than a society woman. The 
John Hays Hammonds were honored by the 
Whitelaw Reids by being included among 
their guests at one of the functions given their 
Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of 
Connaught recently at their New York town 
house. 

The John R. McLeans, with their open- 
house lunches at Friendship, and their vast 
town house, backed by as ample a fortune, 
have apparently never aimed at being dis- 
tinctly ultra-smart, perhaps desiring above all 
else to be comfortable. 

The Edward B. McLeans, their jewel 
caskets now enriched by the world-famous 
Hope and Star of the East diamonds, bid fair 
to do the spectacular social honors for both 
sides of their respective houses. 

Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, during her 
several years' sojourn at the national capital, 
was known far and wide as ''the first lady of 



50 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

Washington," but she seems to have elected 
to live in Paris. But no matter what happens, 
Preston Gibson will never sufifer Washington 
to stagnate. 

List of Washington Ultra-Fashionables 

Mrs. Henry White 

1-2 Former Ambassador and Mrs. Henry 

White. 
3-4 Senator and Mrs. George Peabody 

Wetmore. 
5-6 The Misses Wetmore. 
7-8 Messrs. William S. K. and Roger 
Wetmore. 
9-10 Mr. and Mrs. Perry Belmont. 
11-12 Representative and Mrs. Nicholas 

Longworth. 
13-14 Mr. and Mrs. Preston Gibson. 
15-16 Secretary of the Navy and Mrs. 

George Von L. Meyer. 
17-18 The Misses Meyer. 

19 Mrs. Charles A. Munn. 
20-21 Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Wadsworth. 
22-23 ^^' ^^^ Mrs. James W. Wadsworth. 



OF AMERICA 51 

24 Miss Harriet Wadsworth, 

25-26 Mr, and Mrs, James W, Wadsworth, 
Junior. 

27 Mrs, Richard Townsend. 

28 Mrs, Lawrence Townsend, 

29 Miss Yvonne Townsend, 

30 Mr. and Mrs, Lawrence Townsend, 
31-32 Mr, and Mrs, Edward B, McLean, 

33 Mrs, Leiter, 

34-35 Mr. and Mrs, Joseph Leiter, 

36 Miss Katherine Elkins. 

37-38 Mrs. William H. Draper, 

39 Miss Margaret Draper. 

40 Representative Hamilton Fish. 

41 Miss Rosalind Fish. 

42 Mr, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. 
43-44 Mr, and Mrs, William Corcoran 

Eustis. 

45-46 Mr, and Mrs, Robert B. Roosevelt. 

47 Mrs. Gammell Slater. 

48-49 Mr. and Mrs. Beekman Winthrop. 

50 Mr, Henry White, Jr, 



52 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

CHAPTER III 
PHILADELPHIA 

The national ultra-fashionable set offers 
little scope for men encased in stiff Colonial 
types of manners, with the aspirations of 
dukes and the fortunes of footmen. Paradox 
as it may seem at first blush, Philadelphia 
purports to be a decided vantage ground for 
a social aspirant to hail from, carefully taken 
statistics proving that within the past decade 
more candidates from the Quaker City have 
been received into the smart set at Newport 
than from any other city in America save the 
metropolis itself. 

The Philadelphian prides himself upon 
being what he terms well born, which, of 
course, is a social adjuvant; still, birth and 
patrician breeding to the ultra-fashionable 
alike in New York and London are some- 
what of the nature of accidents and do not 
necessarily belong to the essence of smartness. 
On the other hand, one may be enormously 



OF AMERICA 53 

rich, yet pre-eminently dowdy. There arc 
scores of millionaires' families sequestrated in 
the upper west side of New York City, for 
example, living in social obscurity! Granting 
all this, there must be a nucleus of very rich 
people to form a substrate for a twentieth 
century ultra-fashionable set, whether in 
England or in the United States, and such 
a centralization of social forces in both these 
countries is to deny to the fullest extent a 
fait accompli. 

The most captious critic cannot lampoon 
Philadelphians for having customs without 
manners, as has often been averred of Bos- 
tonians. Still, Philadelphia society, with its 
historic old lumber rooms of Cadwaladers 
and Biddies, must not lose sight of the fact 
that wealth forms the principal ingredient 
entering into the composition of this big social 
trust, the national ultra-fashionable set, whose 
subjective aim is pleasure and whose objective 
one is to make a fine art of social life. But 
for enrollment on its roster one's manners 
must also be comme il faut, and this is patent 
from observing that some of the most opulent 
families on its waiting lists will not be 



54 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

deemed acceptable without undergoing a te- 
dious apprenticeship. 

In cities like Philadelphia and Boston pa- 
trician lineage, or what is commonly termed 
''family," is much overrated as an asset for 
admission into ultra-smart society. Female 
beauty, with which the daughters of the 
Quaker City — not of Boston — have time out 
of mind been graced, is far more of a social 
coign of vantage than ''family." Mrs. Joseph 
Widener, Mrs. Robert Goelet — who was a 
jWhelan of Philadelphia — and Mrs. James F. 
Sullivan, all known to national society, alone 
have given a wide vogue to the pulchritude of 
Philadelphia women. And one of the pre- 
eminent belles of the present season in the City 
of Brotherly Love, whose social leader is Mrs. 
Craig Biddle, with Mrs. Van Rensselaer and 
Mrs. John Thompson Spencer as vice-regal 
aides, is Miss Leta Livingston Sullivan, the 
second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James 
Francis Sullivan and niece of Mrs. James B. 
Clews and Mrs. Charles Emory Smith, of 
New York. Miss Sullivan is a lineal descend- 
ant of the Cavalier, Sergeant Francis Nich- 
olls, proprietor of a ten-thousand-acre Colo- 



OF AMERICA SS 

nial grant In Connecticut, besides being a 
grandson of Sir George Bruce of Carnock 
and eldest brother of Sir Richard Nicholls, 
the first royal Governor of New York, who 
founded the Anglo-Saxon supremacy in that 
city. Among other members of the national 
ultra-fashionable set who trace their lineage 
back to Sergeant Francis Nicholls are Ogden 
Mills, Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Ogden Living- 
ston Mills, Mrs. Lorillard Spencer, Sr., Lor- 
illard Spencer, Jr., Mrs. James B. Clews, 
Chauncey M. Depew, Mrs. Henry C. Phipps 
and the Countess Grannard. 



List of Philadelphia Ultra-Fashion- 
ables 

Mrs. Craig Biddle 

1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Anthony J. DrexeL 
3-4 Mr. and Mrs. Craig Biddle. 

5 Mr. J. R. Barton Willing. 
6-7 Mr. and Mrs. John Thompson Spen- 
cer. 

8 Mr. Willing Spencer. 



S6 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

9-10 Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Van Rens- 
selaer. 

1 1 -1 2 Mr. and Mrs. Joseph E. Widener. 

13-14 Mr, and Mrs. George D. Widener. 
15 Miss Eleanor El kins Widener. 

16-17 Mr. and Mrs. William E. Carter. 

18-19 Mr. and Mrs. James Francis Sullivan. 

20-21 The Misses Frances and Leta Living- 
ston Sullivan. 

22-23 ^^' ^^^ Mrs. Paul Denckla Mills. 
24 Miss Julia Berwind. 

25-26 Mr. and Mrs. George McFadden. 

27-28 Mr. and Mrs. Harold Sands. 

29-30 Mr, and Mrs. Edward T. Stotes- 
bury {Mrs. Oliver Cromwell). 

31-32 Mr, and Mrs. Clarence W. Do Ian. 



OF AMERICA si 

CHAPTER IV 
BALTIMORE 

A Boston litterateur to whom I was once 
giving Baltimore society its meed of praise 
at a dinner, let fly the repartee that a huge 
terrapin ought to be chiseled out of granite 
and perched upon top of the Washington 
Monument in Baltimore. Baltimoreans, alike 
with fashionable folk out in San Francisco, 
are certainly past masters in the art of dining. 

A far more hackneyed truism is it to re- 
count that the Oriole City, time out of mind, 
has been graced with an entail of beautiful 
women without a break in the links. The 
three Caton beauties known at home and 
abroad as the American Graces at the Court 
of George IV., and each of whom married 
British noblemen, were scions of the house 
of Carrolls of Carrollton. At the period when 
the author was a student at the Johns Hop- 
kins University, the Misses Emily and Vir- 
ginia McTavish, kinswomen of the Duchess 
of Leeds, and the Carrolls of the Manor 



5 8 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

shared with Miss Nannie Tiffany (now Mrs. 
Bradley-Jones) and Miss Florence McPhee- 
ters (Mrs. Padelford) the prestige of being 
the reigning belles of Baltimore. 

Baltimore vies with the City of Brotherly 
Love in having been the birthplace of a roster 
of ultra-smart women pre-eminent as leaders 
of national society in New York and New- 
port. Among these social cynosures who 
sprang from this courtly cavalier stock may 
be cited Mrs. Townsend Burden, nee Moale, 
related to the Byrds, of Westover; Mrs. 
Elisha Dyer, who was Miss Sydney Turner, 
a granddaughter of the Bonaparte Pattersons; 
Miss Laura Patterson Swan, Mrs. Henry 
Clews, Jr., Mrs. Richard Irvin and Mrs. Lee 
Tailer, members of the old and fashionable 
Morris family; Mrs. T. Sufifern Tailer, Mrs. 
Anthony J. Drexel, Mrs. James Henry Smith, 
Mrs. William E. Carter (Lucille Polk) and 
the Princess Braganza. The present Mrs. Al- 
fred G. Vanderbilt was Miss Margaret 
Emerson, of the Oriole City. Miss Lota Ran- 
dolph Robinson, who passes much of her time 
in New York and Newport, a daughter of the 
John M. Robinsons, formerly of Baltimore, 



OF AMERICA 59 

is singled out as a typical belle of the ultra- 
smart set. Bom in Virginia, a granddaughter 
of the Byrds, of Westover, and related to the 
Beverly Robinsons, Miss Lota Robinson is 
possessed of much of the epigrammatic wit of 
her intimate friend, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. 

The marriage of a daughter of the Alex- 
ander Browns, of Baltimore, to Mr. T. Suf- 
fern Tailer, of New York and Newport, one 
of the most fashionable and aristocratic beaux 
of society, will in time have the effect of in- 
creasing the Oriole City's ultra-fashionable 
representation at Newport, the Henry Barton 
Jacobs not having been particularly expansive 
in their efforts to launch their fellow-towns- 
folk socially at the City by the Sea. It is high 
time then that the Alexander Browns, who 
have been exceedingly well received at New- 
port under the aegis of the Suffern Tailers, 
should stop hedging and playing coy over 
at Jamestown and Narragansett Pier, and 
should come forward and take a villa at New- 
port and let some of their old friends and 
neighbors from Baltimore share with them 
the '^good thing" with which fortune has 
blessed them at Newport. 



6o UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

List of Baltimore Ultra-Fashionables 

Mrs. Henry Barton Jacobs 

I'he Carrolls, of Carrollton, viz.: 
1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Carroll. 
3-4 Mr. and Mrs. Royal Phelps Carroll. 

5 Miss Suzanne Carroll. 
6-7 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Jerome Bona- 
parte. 

8 Mr. Walter de Curzon Poultney. 

9 Miss Lota Randolph Robinson. 
10 Mr. Henry Walters. 

11-12 Dr. and Mrs. Henry Barton Jacobs. 
13-14 Mr. and Mrs. Walter B. Brooks, Jr., 

nee Cromwell. 
15-16 Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Brown. 

North Carolina 

1-2 Mr. and Mrs. George W. Vanderhilt. 
3-4 Mr. and Mrs. Beekman Lorillard. 

South Carolina 

1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Richard T. Wilson. 



OF AMERICA 6r 

3-4 Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Harriman, 

Kentucky 

I Miss Tevis Camden, 



62 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

CHAPTER V; 

BOSTON 

Mrs. Nathaniel Thayer, born Pauline Re- 
vere, is the acknowledged leader of Boston's 
ultra-fashionables; Mrs. Jack Gardner, of 
the musical and artistic element in that city 
of carefully weeded-out visiting lists. Bos- 
tonians are still devotees of their Brahmin 
caste of families, wealth having made less 
militant inroads upon conservatism than in 
either Philadelphia or Baltimore. 

Boston's representation at Newport was 
falling several degrees below the ultra-smart 
cachet since the absence of the E. Rollins 
Morses, until the Nathaniel Thayers entered 
the lists of entertainers previous to their recent 
period of mourning. Mrs. Thayer is the 
mother of the Countess Moltke and of Mrs. 
Frederic Winthrop, and an aunt of Eugene 
Van Rensselaer Thayer, Jr., who married 
Miss Brooks, a daughter of the Mortimer 
Brooks, of New York and Newport. 

Miss Susan Hargous Appleton, Boston's 



OF AMERICA 63 

most important debutante of the present sea- 
son, with the exception of the Misses Hunne- 
well, is a niece of Mrs. George B. de Forest 
and of Mrs. Woodbury Kane, nee Hargous, 
formerly a much-feted belle of New York and 
Newport. There are few American pedigrees 
the peer of that of the Boston Appletons. 
Mrs. George Von L. Meyer, formerly of Bos- 
ton, who is listed with Washington ultra- 
fashionables, was born an Appleton. 

Apropos of Boston women in general, I am 
rejoiced to know that each year it can be said 
less truthfully that Boston women pay more 
attention to the cosmos than to the cosmetics. 
The French philosopher Helvetius rightly 
said that into the mind of an accomplished 
coquette entered as many ideas and combina- 
tions of ideas as were needful for the mental 
outfit of an Aristotle or a Solon. 

List of Boston Ultra-Fashionables 

Mrs. Nathaniel Thayer 

1-2 Mr, and Mrs, Eugene Van Rensselaer 
Thayer, Jr. 



64 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

3-4 Mr, and Mrs. Prescott Lawrence, 

5 Miss Prescott Lawrence, 

6 Mrs, J, de Forest Danielson. 

7-8 Mr, and Mrs. Hoi lis Hunnewell. 

9-10 Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Thayer. 

1 1- 1 2 Mr, and Mrs. Frederic Winthrop, nee 
Thayer. 

13 Miss Eleanor Sears, 

14-15 Mr, and Mrs. Larz Anderson. 

16-17 Dr. and Mrs. William Appleton, 

18 Miss Susan Hargous Appleton. 

19-20 Mr. and Mrs. Lothrop Ames. 

21-22 Mr. and Mrs. Amor Hollingsworth. 

23-24 Mr. and Mrs. Frederic H. Prince. 

25-26 Mr. and Mrs. William Phillips, nee 

Drayton. 

27-28 Mr. and Mrs. James Lowell Putnam. 

Connecticut 

1-2-3 ^^' ^^^ Mrs. Henry S. Glover and 
Miss Helen Le Roy Glover, of 
Fairfield, Fairfield County, 



OF AMERICA 65 

CHAPTER VT 
PROVIDENCE 

Nothing conspicuously ultra-smart save 
Elisha Dyer, Jr., and the William Watts 
Shermans ever came out of Providence. 
Providence society, although made up of emi- 
nently substantial people, has always been 
somewhat hampered by the homely traits of 
its forefathers, the Puritans of Providence 
plantations. 

In marked contrast to the pioneers of Provi- 
'dence plantations, with their dyspeptic entail, 
early Colonial Newport was settled by those 
courtly old cavaliers, the Dyers, Sir Godfrey 
Marleybone, the Coddingtons, Eastons, Brin- 
leys, Gardiners, Brentons, Cranstons and 
Coggeshalls. No less an authority than 
Colonel Asa Bird Gardiner, president of the 
Order of the Cincinnati of the State of Rhode 
Island, alleges that the Newport Colonial 
cavaliers lived in far more sumptuous style 
than the other royalist families scattered 
sparsely through New England. 



6b UL TRA'FASHIONABLES 

Heredity is practically fate, hence this ex- 
ceptional little discussion of the origin of the 
Providence species. For generations the 
dozen or two Providence families having 
villas at Newport have held a proud social 
position, but the rank and file of them, under 
the new regime since the death of Mrs. Astor, 
are looked upon as too conservative, and above 
all as too loath to part with their money. 
A few others from this staid Baptist Rhode 
Island City, who are too willing to invest in 
social display advertising at Newport, are 
finding their progress no more assured in con- 
sequence. When one takes a villa as near 
home as Newport to Providence, the question 
is at once raised, whose drawing-rooms does 
a family frequent in the home city? 

During a decade or more it has been curious 
to note the Herculean patience manifested in 
the social evolution at Newport of a certain 
somewhat numerous family of long-sufifering 
social aspirants from Providence. Highly 
respectable, and always having known nice 
people, but for the most part uninteresting, 
they have succeeded in performing the leger- 
demain of forming acquaintance with the 



OF AMERICA 67 

ultra-exclusive families of their own city 
mainly by way of Newport. Still they have 
never been able to effect the crossing of the 
threshold of an Astor, Vanderbilt, Ogden 
Mills or a Gerry. 

List of Providence Ultra-Fashionables 
Mrs. John Nicholas Brown 

The Goddards, of Hopeton House, 
i. e.: 
1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Robert H, 1. Goddard. 

3 Mrs. William Goddard. 

4 Mr. Robert H. I. Goddard, Jr. 
5-6 Mr. and Mrs. William Gammell. 
7-8 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ives Gammell. 

9 Mr. Robert H. Ives Gammell. 
lO-ii Mr. and Mrs. T. Shaw-Safe, nee 

Gammell. 
12-13 Mr. and Mrs. Harry Parsons Cross, 

nee Gammell. 

14 Mrs. John Nicholas Brown, 

15 Mrs, Harold Brown. 



68 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

CHAPTER VII 
SAN FRANCISCO 

The California forty-niners, the Fairs, 
Floods, Haggins, Crockers, D. Ogden 
Millses, Mackays and their peers, at a 
time, too, when multi-millionaires of equal 
fortune were somewhat scarce in New York 
City, made up their minds that no matter 
how short some of their pedigrees were, they 
themselves would live long and well. Ac- 
cordingly they set themselves to work to invent 
the cosmopolitan art of dining in America. 
And Mr. Ward McAllister, during his stay 
in San Francisco as a young man, acquired 
the whole gastronomic art of war of the forty- 
niners and came back and imparted what he 
knew to benighted New York, then in the 
throes of the mincing and pinched up Knick- 
erbocker regime. 

What ideas were lacking in the culinary 
art San Francisco imported direct from Paris, 
the delicious and prodigal supplies of vegeta- 
bles and fruits of the Golden Gate lending 



OF AMERICA 69 

additional facilities for good living. Cali- 
fornians now domiciled in New York adhere 
to these delectable traditions, Mrs. Hermann 
Oelrichs and her sister, Mrs. William K. Van- 
derbilt, Jr., having evidently inherited the 
artistic bon vivant trend of their mother, the 
wife of the late Senator Fair, of San Fran- 
cisco, whose entertainments were given on a 
scale of Oriental magnificence. 

San Francisco Ultra-Fashionables 

Mrs. William H. Crocker 

1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Peter D. Martin, nee 

Oelrichs. 
3-4 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Templeton 
Crocker. 
5 Miss Jennie Crocker. 
6-7 Mr. and Mrs. William H. Crocker. 
8 Miss Crocker. 
9-10 Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. 

1 1 Mrs. Bruguiere. 

12 Mr, Louis Bruguiere. 



70 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

CHICAGO 

Marvelous commercial focus that it is, with 
a strikingly handsome residential section be- 
sides, Chicago is far and away more "West- 
ern" in its ideas and prevailing type of natives 
than San Francisco. Chicago, which has been 
aptly yclept the ''Windy City," for reasons 
both real and metaphorical, blusters with a 
pig-headed sort of social autonomy, which by 
no means affiliates well with the metropolis of 
the Western Hemisphere, the real axis about 
which all things revolve — New York. 

Chicago Ultra-Fashionables 

Mrs. Potter Palmer 

I Mrs. Potter Palmer. 

2-3 Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr. 

4 Mrs. Marshall Field. 

5-6 Mr. and Mrs. Hobart Chat field-Taylor, 

7 Miss Chatfield-Taylor. 

Marquette, Michigan* 

1-2 Mr. and Mrs. Edward N. Breitung. 



OF AMERICA 71 

Cincinnati 

I Mrs. John J. Emery. 

Geneseo, New York 

The Wadsworth family. 
I James S. Wadsworth, Esq, 

Buffalo, New York 

1-2 The Rev. and Mrs. George Grenville 
Merrill, nee Dresser, 



72 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

CHAPTER VIII 
NEjWPORT 

Wealth and the highest fashion are focused 
at Newport to such a degree of tension that 
it has become as imperative for a social aspi- 
rant's claims to be passed upon by Newport 
as it was for a potentate of the era of Charle- 
magne to go to St. Peter's, Rome, for cor- 
onation! 

Since the passing of Mrs. Astor, and from 
a complex of causes, the power of money has 
asserted itself as never before in the annals 
of Newport society. A steadily augmented 
little squad of society folk, both all-the-year- 
round residents of Newport and cottage 
owners from New York, some of whom were 
occasionally guests at Mrs. Astor's dinners 
and often at her balls, are now almost stricken 
from the guest lists of the ultra-smart dinners 
and dances. 

Of these victims of social eclipse by the 
whirligig of time, a certain contingent quit 
the place altogether during the height of the 



OF AMERICA 73 

season. It is difficult to dispose of cottages 
of moderate pretensions unless needed to be 
torn down to enlarge adjoining estates, for 
people have a growing aversion to exposing 
themselves and their belongings to being over- 
shadowed by the ultra-fashionables. On the 
other hand, the proportion of palatial villas 
being reared from season to season discounts 
the croaking of social pessimists, who would 
raise the hue and cry that Newport is on the 
decline. 

Although fifty per cent, of the men, in com- 
mon with their families, stand ready to pledge 
their fortunes and their sacred honor to the 
shibboleth of "class," many of them fret and 
fume over the distance of Newport from New 
York, and absent themselves a good share of 
the week, except in the hottest weather. How- 
ever, as it is the women who really set the 
keynote of Newport, as well as of fashionable 
society in general, the record of a day's doings 
sort of index to what manner of life obtains 
of a Bellevue Avenue matron will serve as a 
at this the queen of American watering places. 
Cofifee is often served at ten A. M., before 
rising — an hour earlier than when in town — » 



74 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

in order to allow time for a dip in the ocean 
between eleven and twelve o'clock, down at 
Bailey's bathing beach, which is controlled by 
a close corporation of cottagers. By the way, 
it was not until this season just past that sea 
bathing has become really fashionable among 
Newport cottagers. The latest on dit is the 
project of building not only a solarium for the 
bathers down at Bailey's, but of adding a 
miniature crystal palace of banqueting and 
ballrooms. It would be so convenient for a 
four o'clock A. M. dip in the surf, after the 
dances, and far more exclusive than the Casino 
at all times. 

But to turn another leaf of our Bellevue 
Avenue diary. Breakfast, with two maids in 
attendance — one to assist with toilette and the 
other with the breakfast. If the grande dame 
chances to afifect auburn hair and is one of the 
extremely few even of Newport's habitues 
who is in possession of the celebrated formula 
for producing Titianesque-hued locks, obtain- 
able only under rare conditions in Paris, she 
will pass the better part of two days of each 
month in solitary confinement with her maid, 
going through this starthng and lugubrious 



OF AMERICA 75 

"process." The first application of the paste 
turns the hair a jet black! The second, which 
is spread over several hours later, transmutes 
it into a vivid copper green! The third and 
final poulticing, which is applied much later, 
turns the hair into a glossy auburn — the ideal 
shade, over which poets and painters have 
raved time out of mind. 

But as this is not the day of the Titianesque 
ordeal for our Newport chatelaine, with its 
enforced seclusion, the same marvelously ex- 
pert maid, who is in effect a beauty specialist, 
follows up the cold cream enameling and 
massaging of the night before with a roseate 
liquid beautifier, either rouge vinaigre or 
Imperial Venus tint, either of which, she flat- 
ters herself, will prove impervious to the rav- 
ages of sea bathing. 

Ensconced in her solarium boudoir, looking 
down toward the Cliff walk and the ocean, or 
in a shaded upper porch, with the same 
marine view, our queen of the mode glances 
at her morning's mail and her book of engage- 
ments in the company of her social secretary, 
dictating replies, if they are urgently needed, 
though as much of the communication is car- 



76 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

ried on by telephone as courtesy will allow. 
But what weighs on her mind is the list of 
dinner guests to be made out on the morrow 
and invitations to be sent for a banquet of a 
hundred people, with dancing afterward. An 
impending divorce scandal affords the com- 
plication. Under pretext to her lynx-eyed sec- 
retary, that she is peering far out into the 
ocean to descry an incoming yacht, provided 
she belong to that rampant minority of New- 
port hostesses who convey an erroneous im- 
pression of the resort and its morals to the 
general public, she mentally indulges in some- 
what the following soliloquy: 

^'Mr. and Mrs. Blank are important on 
other lines than the moral ones. I might strike 
off Mrs. Blank's name from my dinner and 
visiting lists, just as I did Mrs. X., who was 
divorced on the statutory grounds, and end by 
turning turtle and gushing ecstatically over 
her afterward, just because a dozen intimate 
friends are insisting that she and her husband 
are necessary adjuncts to society. Some of our 
foremost financiers and representative men 
have their affairs, yet they are cordially re- 
ceived everywhere, and in most cases the so- 



OF AMERICA 77 

ciety woman in the intrigue is welcomed to 
our drawing-rooms, provided she wields 
social power. In spite of this undercurrent of 
talk which has come to the surface in Town 
Topics, the Blanks are received everywhere. 
I will be loving and forgiving; the ignoring 
eye is the better, and I will not erase them 
from the list. In the face of all the hospitality 
we have just been accepting from them, the 
omission would be pointed. Besides, one 
would be hated by a whole group of their 
relatives and friends were any blacklisting 
attempted. As for that matter, nearly half of 
our families of first rate celebrity and any 
size have some sort of a cause celebre — 
divorce or worse." 

Next in order, the housekeeper or maitre 
d'hotel is commanded to receive a few direc- 
tions, perhaps, about the menu for a dinner to 
be given on Sunday evening, or criticisms to 
be passed on the marketing. A blase society 
like that of Newport hankers after gastro- 
nomic novelties, and our hostess knows well 
that where the head of an establishment her- 
self takes a personal interest, the best cuisine 
is almost always to be found. To live like the 



\ 



78 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

Gerrys and Berwinds, for example, has be- 
come the Lucullan proverb of the day at 
Newport. 

The golden strand of Bailey's bathing beach 
this morning is transformed into a veritable 
beauty show, with Mrs. Leonard M. Thomas, 
V ^^ the former Blanche Oelrichs; Mrs. Oliver 
Gould Jennings, Mrs. Robert Goelet, Mrs. 
Reginald Vanderbilt, Mrs. Burke-Roche, 
Mrs. Joseph Widener, Miss Angelica Brown, 
Mrs. James Brown Potter, Miss Lota Robin- 
son, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, Mrs. Lorillard 
Spencer, Sr., Mrs. Henry Clews and Mrs. 
David Dows, the former Gwendolyn Burden, 
disporting themselves in the foreground. 

After a refreshing dip in the ocean and a 
sunshiny dalliance on the beach at Bailey's, 
the chauffeur whirls his mistress and her maid 
back through Bellevue Avenue in time for 
the former to dress for a large luncheon party 
of women, followed by bridge, to be given at 
Berger's by a young matron actually stopping 
at a pension, who is thus paying off the social 
debts of the season, having received a thou- 
sand-dollar cheque from her father-in-law 
mainly for that debit and credit balancing of 



OF AMERICA 79 

the social ledger. It is only young couples 
who are the scions of families of stellar social 
prestige and great wealth who have the 
temerity to stop in pensions at Newport. 

At the entrance to Berger's Milady fairly 
collides with a young man, who is crossing 
the threshold in company with a wealthy 
Italian nobleman of royal blood, a relative of 
more than one European monarch, who has 
just arrived and is destined to be the lion of 
the season. She gives a stony and flaunting 
cut to the young American, who is really of 
an eminent Southern family far outclassing 
the tradesfolk from whom she herself sprang. 
He is the young tenor who sang at her dinner 
the night before, and to whom her secretary 
has just mailed his cheque. He has been in 
her employ, and he must not be recognized 
in the presence of Society; he must be ig- 
nored along with the servants and the trades- 
people. 

His singing of the night before her guests 
went into raptures over. The young tenor had 
sung at a chamber concert at the Quirinal 
Palace at Rome; the Queen had congratu- 
lated him in person, and afterward bowed to 



8o UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

him on more than one occasion on her drives 
in the Pincio. 

The bridge following the lunch of costly 
favors and floral garnitures is somewhat cur- 
tailed, nearly all the guests having pledged 
themselves either to take active part or patron- 
ize a garden fete to be given for charity on 
the lawn of one of society's foremost enter- 
tainers. Whenever the market has been bad 
and Wall Street depressed for a season or 
more, a whole crop of charity entertainments 
is sure to spring up at Newport. This form 
of altruism proves as much of a blessing to 
society in an ^'ofif" financial Summer as it does 
to the objects of its almsgiving, for it helps to 
save society from what is the sword of Damo- 
cles ever hanging over the American ultra- 
fashionable set — from being bored by itself. 

Anent the oft-quoted prevalence of divorce 
at Newport. In proportion to the number 
of Summer cottagers, divorces are not more 
frequent than in other sections of the country, 
and other social strata, save among the middle 
class. It is the stellar prominence of certain 
of the Newport families in which the aid of 
the courts is invoked in conjugal infelicities 



OF AMERICA 8i 

of the sort which blazons the fall from marital 
grace. In an instance like that at Newport 
last season of the remarriage of a divorced 
man, whose family had been munificent bene- 
factors to the church for generations, it was 
in direct violation of ecclesiastical ethics both 
in the Church of England and in its offshoot, 
the American church, for the contracting par- 
ties to be censured by name from the pulpit 
or by interviews given out by bishops and 
other ecclesiastics to newspapers. Such a 
course of procedure simply has the effect of 
alienating the rich from the church, and the 
latter needs them when there is a cathedral 
to finish which will be a bulwark to the whole 
cause of Christianity, irrespective of creed, in 
America. Numbers of the clergy lose sight of 
the fact that the church was not primarily in- 
tended for saints, and that its mission is to 
inculcate by precept and example general 
principles which will guide the errant, instead 
of hammering at them by name in the presence 
of a whole nation. 

As to alleged excess in drinking among so- 
ciety folk at Newport, it is far more preva- 
lent and public in various sections of the 



8 2 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

South ; and it is the South, especially the far 
South, which is one of the most trenchant 
critics of Newport — largely through envy. 

A foreword about social leadership at New- 
port. Few figments of the imagination bear 
less support from facts than the allegation that 
rivalry exists, for instance, between two such 
hostesses of international repute as Mrs. 
Ogden Mills and Mrs. John R. Drexel. The 
arena of intense social ambitions has been in 
a measure transferred to the London season 
and its aftermath of following royalty down to 
the Continental spas. 

With reference to the British nobility as 
contrasted somewhat with the American ultra- 
fashionable set, the main reason perhaps why 
it continues to exist in this reactionary era so 
given to the shattering of idols and building 
the sepulchres of the fathers, is its studied 
unobtrusiveness. The better specimens of this 
privileged class are simple and democratic 
from the serene consciousness of exalted social 
position, backed by generation upon genera- 
tion of good breeding. I was once a guest 
at a lunch in London where the Duke of Nor- 
folk and the Marquis of Ripon were the per- 



OF AMERICA 83 

sonages of honor. Each of these peers of the 
realm stood forth as an object lesson — an ex- 
ponent of manners of noble simplicity. 

To move then with acceptancy in the smart 
London court circle is to reach a plane of 
exaltation on the Parnassus of social aspira- 
tion higher than that of Newport, although 
the latter by no means always admits the 
valuation in the case of postulants for admis- 
sion to its magic circle. If one has in London 
the avant heralding of being an Ogden Mills, 
a Vanderbilt, a Goelet, an Astor, a Pierpont 
Morgan, or a Belmont, for instance, the doors 
of its exclusive drawing-rooms swing open 
sesame. For Americans not dowered with in- 
ternational social and financial prestige, time, 
tact and, above all, ceaseless expenditures of 
money are requisite. 

To the American social aspirant, however, 
it is somewhat comforting to be apprised that 
no mean proportion of titled English folk is 
privately engaged in some form of commis- 
sion business. To one. Lord So-and-So has 
entrusted his entire cellar of grand old 
encrusted ports and '72 clarets, "which have 
never been disturbed by the family until this 



84 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

hour." Another knows of a horse for sale that 
has '^drawn the phaeton of a duchess from the 
Grosvenor Gate of Hyde Park over to Marble 
Arch. And the horse is worth, in consequence, 
at least a thousand dollars, even though he 
may have spavined hocks and be broken 
vended." 

The London season comes dear to the social 
aspirant; but to come nearer home, the query 
is often put, of what would the average ex- 
penditures consist and what sum would they 
aggregate for a family to maintain a villa at 
Newport and move with eclat in its ultra- 
smart set? There is such a nexus of qualify- 
ing conditions that it would seem almost 
futile at first blush to essay an enumeration of 
particulars for such an induction. There are 
families well placed and moving in the ultra- 
exclusive set whose manner of living and 
equipage are positively humble in contrast to 
that of Mrs. Vanderbilt, the Ogden Mills, 
Colonel Astor, the Belmonts, Gerrys, Ber- 
winds, Townsend Burdens, or Arthur Curtiss 
James. But it must be borne in mind that most 
of the mediocre spenders are related to some 
of the great houses, and bound by ties of well- 



OF AMERICA 85 

nigh inseparable intimacy to others. Of 
course, a lady cannot be seen walking on Belle- 
vue Avenue any more than a member of the 
resident nobility can on the Corso in Rome. 

Granting us our own major premise, how- 
ever, we will attempt a bill of particulars for 
a family which has a measure of social entree, 
but whose chief asset and claim to recognition 
will be the expenditure of money. More than 
a hundred thousand dollars could easily be 
dissipated from the first of July to the end of 
the Newport Horse Show, which ends the first 
week of September, not inclusive of the cost 
of keeping a yacht, which always enhances the 
success of a Summer social campaign. Sup- 
pose one making such a bid for social honors 
is to build a villa at Newport. With the de- 
fections of entertainers over to the London 
season, and as the resort is badly suffering 
from the lack of a fashionably appointed and 
eligibly situated Summer hotel, and two-thirds 
of the cottagers are opposed to it, the success 
of its Summer season is quite dependent upon 
additional villas being built on some of its 
large outlying acreage. 

A show place, something altogether out of 



S6 ULTRA'FASHIONABLES 

the ordinary, which is destined to pique so- 
ciety's jaded visual sense, cannot be built and 
furnished for less than a million dollars, not- 
inclusive of the grounds; e. g., the palatial 
Arthur Curtiss James establishment, whose 
doors have lately been thrown open to society 
at Newport. In limine then, your Newport 
season is annually going to cost more than 
$50,000 for a roof over one's head, say, 
$70,000, covering the interest on the money 
invested, taxes and repairs. For entertaining, 
living expenses, servants' wages, fuel, electric 
lighting, etc., $25,000. For what new motor 
cars may be needed (nearly every member of 
one's family being supplied with one, aside 
from several for general use), chauffeurs' 
wages and incidentals, $18,000 is a conserva- 
tive estimate. Modistes, dressmakers and 
tailors' bills, dues to clubs and other personal 
expenditures of the family are of course not 
included in the above figures. 

The Arthur Curtiss Jameses are destined to 

\ cut a wide swath in Newport society, and the 

1 housewarming of their magnificent villa at 

'Brenton's Cove lately was attended by a nota- 

.ble assemblage of the elect, and they were also 



OF AMERICA ^1 

included in the guest list of the Whitelaw 
Reids in this city in one of the series of fetes 
given in honor of their Royal Highnesses the 
Duke and Duchess of Connaught. Still, like 
the John Hays Hammonds, of Washington, 
the Arthur Curtiss Jameses, as evinced by 
some of the guest lists of their dinners and 
house parties, have not yet arrived at an ex- 
actly scientific conception of Who's Who in 
ultra-fashionable America. 

Speaking in general, one may be dowered 
with villas, Italian gardens, galleries of price- 
less paintings, yachts and pots of gold, but if 
the Ogden Mills cachet be lacking, one's New- 
port season, albeit enjoyable in certain ways, 
will be wanting in its highest distinction, and 
socially and at the same time very figuratively 
speaking, might be likened to a torso — the 
trunk of a statue with head and arms lopped 
off. Almost needless it is to reiterate that since 
the passing of Mrs. Astor, the acknowledged 
leader not only of Newport, but of American 
society in general — for there is a national 
ultra-fashionable set distributed by grace of 
New York and Newport through several of 
our provincial cities — is Mrs. Ogden Mills. 



8 8 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

Devoid of aspirations for national social lead- 
ership, making no effort to blend the various 
social sets, her dances seldom outnumbering 
one hundred and fifty people and her dinners 
thirty or forty guests, Mrs. Mills is accorded 
this exalted prerogative by the tacit acclama- 
tion of the American ultra-fashionable world. 

Born a Livingston of the Manor, of large 
and lucrative estates, Mrs. Mills is naturally 
guided somewhat by a predilection for patri- 
cian birth and breeding; still, of the older 
families moving in her circle, nearly all con- 
sist of those possessed of wealth enough to 
keep up fashionable. 

Family and wealth, a powerful combine — 
a Gordian knot! The same categories apply 
to the Ogden Mills as well as to the Livingston 
side of the house, although the years of ad- 
versity which befell the earlier career of the 
late D. O. Mills and one or two of his more 
immediate forefathers, might seem to cloud 
the distinctness of the assertion somewhat. 
Known to few is it that Ogden Mills and his 
sister, Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, wife of our present 
Ambassador to England, are lineal descend- 
ants of the early Colonial proprietor of the 



OF AMERICA ^ 

Mills Lordship, Richard Mills, Esq., of Strat- 
ford, Connecticut. Richard Mills, Esq., who 
subsequently removed to Westchester County, 
New York, where the family became con- 
nected with the Pells and Ogdens, married 
while living in Connecticut the only daughter 
of the Cavalier, Sergeant Francis Nicholls, 
who had a proprietary grant under the Crown 
of more than ten thousand acres at Stratford, 
Connecticut, and was a grandson of Sir 
George Bruce, of Carnock, a scion of Robert 
Bruce. The British pedigree of Mrs. Richard 
Mills far eclipsed that of any Livingston who 
ever emigrated to our coasts. And her uncle, 
Sir Richard Nicholls, was the founder of the 
Anglo-Saxon supremacy in New York, be- 
sides naming both New York and Albany. 
Bishop Nicholls, of California, is a scion of 
this same lineage. 

The Countess of Grannard, nee Ogden 
Mills, can see the grand chateau of her royal 
house of Bruce forefathers still standing in the 
great park of Ampthill, Bedfordshire, Eng- 
land, near the cross marking the site of the 
castle to which Catherine of Aragon repaired 
while her divorce from Henry VIII. was 



90 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

pending. The same chateau now designated 
the Park House, with its forest of oaks, the 
most famous in Great Britain, is now occupied 
by Lady Ampthill, a former lady-in-waiting 
to Queen Victoria. 



OF AMERICA 91 

CHAPTER IX 

^THE 300" 

NEW YORK AND NEWPORT SO- 
CIETY'S INNERMOST CIRCLE 

Mrs. Ogden Mills 

1-2 Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor. 

3 Mr. Vincent Astor. 

4-5 Mr. and Mrs. Charles B, Alexan^ 

der. 

6-7 The Misses Alexander. 

8-9 Mr. and Mrs. Edmund L. Baylies. 

10 Mrs. James Abercromhie Burden. 

11-12 Mr. and Mrs. James A. Burden. 

13 Mr. Williams P. Burden. 

14-15 Mr. and Mrs. Townsend Burden. 

16 Miss Evelyn Byrd Burden. 

17 Mrs. W. A. M, Burden. 

18-19 Mr. and Mrs. Townsend Burden, 

Junior. 
20-21 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Scott Burden, 



92 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

22 Miss Angelica S. Brown. 

23-24 Mr. and Mrs. Edward J . Berwind. 

25-26 Mr. and Mrs. R. Livingston Beeck- 

man. 

27-28 Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont. 

29 Mr. Raymond Belmont. 

30-31 Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont, Jr. 

32 Mrs. Frederic Bronson. 

33-34 Mr. and Mrs. Frederic 0. Beach. 

35-36 Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Brooks. 

37 Mr. L. F. Holbrook Betts. 

38-39 Mr. and Mrs. Francis C. Bishop. 

40-41 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Carroll. 

42-43 Mr. and Mrs. Royal Phelps Carroll. 

44 Miss Suzanne Carroll. 

45-46 Mr. and Mrs. W. Bayard Cutting. 

/\rj Mr. James De Wolfe Cutting. 

48 Miss Eliazbeth Cannon. 

49-50 Mr. and Mrs. J. Francis A. Clark. 

51-52 Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clews. 

53 Mr. Henry Clews, Jr. 

54-55 Mr. and Mrs. James B. Clews. 

56-57 Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Collier. 

58 Mr. Rawlins Lowndes Cottenet. 

59 Mrs. Moses Taylor Campbell. 

60 Miss Caroline Duer. 



OF AMERICA 93 

61-62 Mr\ and Mrs. David Dows, nee 

Burden. 

63-64 Mr. and Mrs. William Earl Dodge. 

65-66 Mr. and Mrs. Chaiincey M. Depew. 

67-68 Mr. and Mrs. George B. de Forest. 

69-70 Mr. and Mrs. J. Gordon Douglas. 

71-72 Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Dyer. 

73-74 Mr. and Mrs. John R. Drexel. 

75 Miss Alice Gordon Drexel. 

76-77 Mr. and Mrs. Anthony J. Drexel, 

Jr., nee Gould. 

78-79 Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. 

80-81 Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Jr. 

82-83 Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Freling- 

huysen. 

84-85 Mr. and Mrs. Paulding Fosdick. 

86 Mr. Eliot Gregory. 

87-88 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson. 

89-90 Mr. and Mrs. R. Horace Gallatin. 

91-92 Mr. and Mrs. F. Gray Griswold. 

93-94 Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd C. Griscom. 

95 Mrs. Goelet. 

96 Mr. Robert Walton Goelet. 

97 Mrs. Ogden Goelet. 

98-99 Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goelet. 

lOO-lOl Mr. and Mrs. Elbridge T. Gerry. 



94 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

102-103 The Misses Angelica and Mabel 

Gerry, 
104-105 Mr. and Mrs, Robert Livingston 

Gerry, 
106-107 Mr. and Mrs. Peter Goelet Gerry. 

108 Mrs. Richard Gambrill. 
109-110 Mr. and Mrs. George Jay Gould. 
111-112 Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence L. Gilles- 
pie, 
113-114 Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. LLoffman. 
115-116 Mr. and Mrs. William Pierson 

LL ami It on. 
1 1 7-1 18 Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cooper LJewitt. 
1 19-120 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Llitchcock, 

Junior. 
1 21-122 Mr. and Mrs, F, Grand d' Haute- 

ville, 
123-124 Miss Marion Hollins. 
125-126 Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Have- 

meyer. 
127-128 Mr. and Mrs, Frederick C. Have 

meyer. 
129-130 Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Harriman. 

131 Miss Carol Harriman. 
^32-133 Mr. and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman. 
^34'^ 35 -M^' and Mrs. J. Arden Harriman. 



OF AMERICA 95] 

136-137 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hastings. 

138 Mr. D. Phoenix Ingraham. 

139-140 Mr. and Mrs. C. Oliver Iselin. 

141 Mr. Adrian Iselin, Second. 

142 Mr. Adrian Iselin. 

143-144 The Misses Therese and Louise 

Iselin. 

145-146 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Iselin. 

147-148 Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Iselin. 

149-150 Colonel and Mrs. William lay. 

151-152 Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Curtiss lames. 

1 53" 1 54 ^^' ^^^ Mrs. Oliver G. Jennings. 

155-156 Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones. 

157 Miss Sadie Jones. 

158 Mrs. James P. Kernochan. 
159-160 Mr. and Mrs. John Innes Kane. 

161 Mrs. Woodbury Kane. 

162 Mr. Pierre Lorillard. 

163 Mr. Pierre Lorillard, Jr. 

164 Mr. Griswold Lorillard. 

165 Mrs. Maturin Livingston. 
166-167 Mr. and Mrs. Goodhue Livingston 
168-169 Mr. and Mrs. W. Goad by Loew. 

1 70-171 Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Cass Ledyard 

172 Mr. Charles Lanier. 

173-174 Mr. and Mrs. James F. D. Lanier. 



96 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

175-176 Mr, and Mrs. Philip M. Lydig. 

177-17^ Mr. and Mrs. W. Starr Milles. 

179 Miss Starr Milles, 

1 80 Miss Muriel Morris. 
181-182 Mr. and Mrs. Levi P. Morton. 

183 Miss Morton. 

184-185 Mr. and Mrs. Ogden Mills. 

186-187 Mr. and Mrs. Ogden Livingston 
Mills. 

^ 188-189 Mr. and Mrs. Clarence H. Mackay. 

1 90- 1 91 Mr. and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan. 

192-193 Mr. and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, 
Junior, 

194 Mr, Frederic Townsend Martin. 

195-196 Mr, and Mrs. Bradley Martin, Jr, 

197 Mr, Charles A. Munn. 

198-199 Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Mortimer, 

200-201 Mr. and Mrs. Richard Mortimer. 

202-203 Mr. and Mrs. Henry W. McVickar. 

204 Mrs. Frederic Neil son, 

205 Mr. Alphonse de Navarro, 

206 Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs. 
207-208 Mr. and Mrs. Stephen D. Olin. 
209-210 Mr. and Mrs, Ralph Pulitzer, nee 

Webb, 

2 1 1 Mr. Howard Phipps. 



OF AMERICA 97 

212-213 Mr, and Mrs. Henry C. Phipps. 

214-215 Mr. and Mrs. Francis Key Pendle- 
ton. 

216-217 Mr. and Mrs. James Brown Potter. 

218 General Horace Porter. 

219-220 Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Robinson. 

221-222 Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. 

223-224 Mr. and Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid. 

225-226 Mr. and Mrs. George L. Rives. 

227 Miss Mildred Rives. 

228 Mr. Moncure Robinson. 

229 Miss Lota Robinson. 

230-231 Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Livingston 
Satterlee. 
232 Mrs. William Watts Sherman. 
233.234 Mr. and Mrs. Richard Stevens. 

235 Miss Anna Sands. 
236-237 Mr. and Mrs. Lorillard Spencer, 
Junior. 

238 Mr. Lispenard Stewart. 

239 Mr. W. Rhinelander Stewart, Jr. 

240 Miss Laura Patterson Swan. 
241-242 Mr. and Mrs. William Payne 

Thompson. 
243-244 Mr. and Mrs. Henry A. C. Taylor. 
7 ^5-246 Mr. and Mrs. T. Suffern Tailer. 



98 ULTRA-FASHION ABLES 

247 Mrs, Hamilton McK. Twombly. 

248 Miss Ruth Vanderbilt Twombly. 
249-250 Mr. and Mrs. Leonard M, Thomas, 

251 Mrs. Vanderbilt, 

252-253 Mr. and Mrs, William K. Vander- 
bilt. 

254-255 Mr. and Mrs, William K. Vander- 
bilt, Jr, 

256 Mr. Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. 

257-258 Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Van- 
derbilt. 

259-260 Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. 

261-262 Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt. 

263 Mrs. French Vanderbilt. 

264-265 Mr. and Mrs, Reginald Vanderbilt, 

266 Mr. James J. Van Alen, 

267 Miss Van Alen, 

268 Miss Alice Van Rensselaer, 
269-270 Dr. and Mrs. W. Seward Webb. 
271-272 Mr. and Mrs, James JVatson Webb, 
273-274 Mr, and Mrs, Lawrence Water- 
bury, 

275-276 Mr. and Mrs, Frank S, Witherbee. 

277 Miss Witherbee, 

278-279 Mr. and Mrs. Whitney Warren. 



OF AMERICA 99 

280-281 Mr. and Mrs. George Henry War- 
ren. 

282 Miss Constance Warren. 

283 Mr. Egerton L. Winthrop. 
284-285 Mr. and Mrs. Egerton L. Win- 
throp, Jr. 

286 Mr. Frederic Bronson Winthrop. 
287-288 Mr. and Mrs. William Woodward. 

289 Mr. Craig Wadsworth. 
290-291 Mr. and Mrs. M. Orme Wilson. 
292-293 Mr. and Mrs. M. Orme Wilson, Jr. 

294 Mr. Richard Trornton Wilson. 
295-296 Mr. and Mrs. J. Norman de R. 

Whitehouse. 
297-298 Mr. and Mrs. Harry Payne Whit- 
ney. 
299-300 Mr. and Mrs. Payne Whitney, 



1 00 VL TRA-FASHIONABLES 



CHAPTER X 

THE MISADVENTURES OF MRS. 

DETRIMENTAL— A SOCIAL 

CAREER 

Mrs. Detrimental, a sort of female knight 
errant of social adventure — a somewhat prev- 
alent type. Birthplace, Denver — a propitious 
social star to be born under. Father, a livery- 
stable keeper — not so lucky an owner. Pater- 
nal grandmother, cook for Miners' camps — 
not a bar sinistre in Denver society. Mrs. 
Detrimental's mother with only a country dis- 
trict primary school training, secures a good 
education for her pretty daughter, who mar- 
ries a boarder of theirs, a rough and ready son 
of the border, but who in the lapse of a decade 
proves to be a multi-millionaire, controlling 
mines eclipsing the wealth of Ormus and of 
Ind. 

The Detrimentals Start Out From 
Denver 

As for society, Mr. Detrimental ^ Vants none 



OF AMERICA loi 

of it," but shares heart and soul as a silent part- 
ner, his wife^s and daughter's unquenchable 
ambitions. Mrs. Detrimental and her daugh- 
ter accordingly, betake themselves to the me- 
tropolis for a couple of Winters establishing 
themselves in a showy house on Riverside 
Drive. They invest heavily in two charities 
and are soon bidden to dances and lunches by 
soi disant ^^social leaders" who lie in wait for 
Western nouveaux riches. Alas! by a collision 
of carriages, the smashing of automobiles, or 
some other accident, they fall in for a bit with 
a genuine woman of fashion of the fin fleur of 
the smart set. Mrs. Detrimental confides to 
her the social campaign projects which are 
giving her sleepless nights, quoting with ela- 
tion and peculiar swelling of the throat as 
friends the names of Mrs. So-and-So, the 
aforesaid leaders of the '^best society." 

The smart woman takes the ground from 
under her feet by confronting her with the 
statement that the alleged "social leaders" 
quoted by her are themselves "detrimental." 
The woman of fashion quickly perceives that 
personally she can do nothing socially for 
Mrs. Detrimental but give advice, as a long 



102 ULTRA-FASHION ABLES 

and tedious technical training is needed, and 
wisely tells her to pack her trunks for a Win- 
ter in Rome, this chancing to be an auspicious 
year — the Anno Santo or Holy Jubilee year. 
They sail in November, finding to their dis- 
may only one passenger of the real American 
ultra-fashionable set on board the huge North 
German Lloyd steamer, and she refuses, not 
only by actions, but by words, to have anything 
to do with Mrs. and Miss Detrimental, al- 
though she is so hard pressed by ennui that she 
takes up with a pretty female purchasing agent 
from Wanamaker's millinery department and 
her companion, a sleek drummer, even sitting 
at a small table with them in the dining saloon, 
as they could levy no sort of social claim upon 
her. 

Shortly before the steamer reaches port, 
the Detrimentals fall in with a young man 
of stranded exchequer who had lately dropped 
down and out of the smart set of New York 
and Newport for that obvious reason. They 
had often read his name in the newspapers as 
''among those present" and they wisely adopt 
him for a social cicerone, after proper in- 
quiries, and stop at the Grand Hotel, Rome, by 



OF AMERICA 103 

his advice, dining him often, and receiving as 
recompense a few introductions to really 
smart Americans, who are held back from go- 
ing down to Egypt for the Winter by rumors 
of the plague. Mrs. Detrimental and her 
daughter hire a pew in the American Episco- 
pal Church in the Via Nationale and give lib- 
erally besides to the rector in aid of the con- 
version of Catholics to Episcopalians and their 
own conversion to smartness, following this up 
with a dinner at the Grand Hotel in honor of 
the rector, for which he invites two-thirds of 
the guests and their social secretary the other 
third. The rector speaks a good word for 
them to their Ambassador to whom they 
brought no letters, and they receive one invita- 
tion to a reception of their country's supreme 
representative at the Piombini palace, their 
point de resistance on this occasion being, not 
their manners which were only tolerable, but 
their gowns — copies of their North German 
Lloyd's cynosure's. 

A nobleman to whom Mrs. Detrimental's 
secretary had loaned money sans-returns years 
before, secures for them an introduction by 
means of which they become registered at the 



1 04 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

Palestra, on the Quirinal Hill, Rome's exclu- 
sive Casino, and Miss Detrimental, who is 
pretty and fairly chic, is actually bidden to 
join the hunting set of Italian nobility and 
fashionable Americans scurrying out over the 
old Appian Way for a steeplechase. The 
Ambassador, a knowing man of the world, 
speedily divines the supreme aim and goal of 
Mrs. Detrimental's existence to be, not Rome, 
Paris, or London, but Newport, and accord- 
ingly recommends her, to secure the entree of 
the Tuesday receptions given by Hayward, 
the honorary Papal Chamberlain, at his 
sumptouus palace near St. Peter's, but offers 
not a hand to help. 

Mrs. Detrimental now buys up, at an exor- 
bitant price, some tickets to the Tribuna, out 
in the portico of St. Peter's, to range her party 
in juxtaposition to the Papal and other no- 
bility, to witness the splendid ceremony of the 
opening of the Holy Door, thus placing a 
couple of smart Americans under heavy obli- 
gations by accepting them. Though them- 
selves Protestant Episcopalians — since the 
date when Mrs. Detrimental conceived the 
idea of being born again smart — they now all 



OF AMERICA 105 

of a sudden exhibit a leaning toward the 
Church of Rome, at least as long as their con- 
versation with the rector of the American 
College, who has secured them a presentation 
to the Pope, lasts, Mrs. Detrimental actually- 
warming up, under the influence of Roman 
candles, to the extent of offering a donation 
to be applied to the purchase of rugs to be 
laid on the cold stone pavements of the stu- 
dents' cells. The upshot of this beneficence 
is that some Tuesday the Detrimentals find 
their feet treading the scarlet velvet carpet- 
ings of the courts and grand staircase of Bra- 
mante's masterpiece, the Palazzo Giraud, the 
palace of Honorary Papal Chamberlain Hay- 
ward, the social leader of English-speaking 
Catholics in Rome, at whose levees a chosen 
few wealthy American Episcopalians are in 
attendance. Toward the approach of Mardi 
Gras Mrs. Detrimental, at the instigation of 
her secretary, the social cicerone adverted to, 
manages to have it leak out that she will 
donate a princely sum of money to the King 
to have the carnival in the Corso restored that 
year — provided others will combine financial 
forces ; she knows well enough they will not, 



io6 ULTRA^FASHIONABLES 

but Miss Detrimental's dot has become town- 
talk all the same. 

But Mrs. Detrimental and her daughter 
are all the while actually en route for New- 
port, and already racking their brains to try 
to conjecture what proportion of those few 
smart Americans in Rome, whose Summer 
habitat is Newport and upon whom they are 
now lavishing money, will not by August be 
suffering from aphasia and every other sort 
of queer lapses of tongue and memory. 
Abandoning the saturnalia of their Roman 
triumphs at just the proper time, our heroine, 
her daughter and their suite of courier, 
French maid, male mentor and coach — now 
installed secretary at a fixed salary in reality, 
but made to pose as society man in public — 
take the train de luxe for Paris, quartering 
themselves at the Hotel Ritz. 

The excitement over shopping at Paquin's, 
Doucet's and the millinery and jewelry shops 
along the Rue de la Paix acts as a rest cure 
for several days, after keeping up an enforced 
and precarious social position in the Eternal 
City, but they speedily find that the social 
triumphs of the Grand Hotel, Rome, are not 



OF AMERICA 107 

to be repeated, even on a small scale, at the 
Ritz. But to her joy, Mrs. Detrimental finally 
descries on the hotel register of the Paris edi- 
tion of the New York Herald the name of the 
American family of fashion whom she had 
entertained in Rome in her loge in the 
tribuna, at the opening of the Holy Door at 
St. Peter's, and afterward at a sumptuous 
lunch. And a moment or two later the grande 
dame herself passes them by, without cutting 
them, to be sure, but tactfully avoiding them 
and walking straight over to a woman who on 
inspection proved to be the beautiful New- 
port divorcee of highest fashion, who had 
repelled Mrs. Detrimental's every advance at 
self-introduction aboard the North German 
Lloyd steamer coming over. She was actually 
comparing notes with their new-made Roman 
acquaintance and staring dubiously! 

There was a North American chill in the 
air of the Ritz, and our heroine, with her 
daughter and avant courier, the social secre- 
tary, was relieved enough to be driven up the 
Champs Elysee to the Elysee Palais Hotel for 
a cup of tea. About half an hour later, when 
they were all recovering from an attack of 



io8 ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

incipient heart failure, their whilom Roman 
acquaintance was ushered into the palm-room, 
accompanied by a little group of ultra- 
fashionable folk. Mrs. Detrimental stepped 
forward and greeted her with effusion, but 
her '*f riend," while not manifesting actual dis- 
pleasure, drew her aside and presented her, 
not to the smart people with whom she was 

talking, but to a Mrs. Van and Miss Van , 

old friends of her mother's from New York. 
Mrs. Detrimental's spirits rose at the sound 
of the name indicative of one of the oldest 
families of the metropolis, but the secretary, 
by a course of delicate but adroit question- 
ing — his mother having been an old Knicker- 
bocker — repressed that comfortable emotion. 
The Van 's did not belong to the fashion- 
able branch of their family and did not even 
know any of the Gallatins, Pells, de Peysters, 
the Alexander Van Rensselaers, Rhineland- 
ers, or, in fact, any of the group of New York's 
old patrician families, who had kept to the 
fore and stood nearest the throne of the ultra- 
smart set. 

The two women were able to find partial 
relief for their emotions of vexation by cut- 



OF AMERICA 109 

ting dead as a doornail two of their ^'detri- 
mental" friends of the upper west side, New 
York contingent, v/ho suddenly arrived upon 
the scene of discomfiture ready to welcome 
them with open arms. But almost in the next 
carriage passed some Californians who knew 
all about them, and were voluble talkers, too. 
At the Ambassador's, to cap the climax, Mrs. 
Detrimental met with a rebuff from head- 
quarters. It seems that two weeks later the 
President of France was to give a ball at the 
Elysee Palace, and our heroine, in the mo- 
mentary absence of her social secretary, ven- 
tured to ask the Ambassador to secure three 
invitations for her, bolstering up her claims 
with the avowal that her family came over 
with William the Conqueror and was of the 
purest Norman blood. 

"My good Madame, isn't it sufficient for 
any family to have started in all right with its 
own country?" the Ambassador tartly replied. 

Safe in the seclusion of their carriage the 
social secretary delivers himself to Mrs. Det- 
rimental, now wallowing in the abyss of 
chagrin and humiliation : "Pardon my plain- 
ness of speech, Madame, but that's what I'm 



no ULTRA-FASHIONABLES 

hired for. Don't I beg of you, ever trust your- 
self to talk on 'family' again to your dying 
day. It's only bundling out the old livery 
stable in Denver, your miner's cook of a 
grandmother, and every other ridiculous scrap 
of family history which you implored me to 
be on my guard against exposing. The very 
notice of our arrival, with the fulsome men- 
tion of the social attentions which we received 
in Rome, which I had inserted in the Paris 
edition of the New York Herald just to humor 
you, is working mischief. Certain of those 
society people from the Grand Hotel, Rome, 
are at this very moment in Paris, and they 
have fallen in with knowing ones from the 
States, and they are beginning to analyze, and 
I'm afraid they will never stop analyzing. 
The odds are against us in Paris, which is 
anyhow so overrun with jWestern people that 
it seems like another Chicago. We must beat 
a retreat to London." 

The Shower of Gold in London. 

In London Mrs. Detrimental and her suite 
put up at Claridge's. In Paris they had re- 



OF AMERICA in 

ceived the cold shoulder, but had acquired 
experience. In London, however, the secre- 
tary managed to get them speedily presented 
to Lord and Lady Down-in-the-Heel, nobility 
of exalted station but crumbling fortunes. By 
an ingenious artifice Lord Down-in-the-Heel 
was led to manipulate a block of their own 
mining stock, which brought him in such a 
yield that he and his titled wife were ready 
to serve them to the queen's taste, Miss Detri- 
mental being thus at once provided with a 
chaperone from the peerage. The policy of 
the Detrimentals was now to avoid their 
fellow-Americans for a while, until they 
should ingratiate themselves with the English 
nobility more thoroughly. They gave several 
dinners and theatre parties, with titled persons 
mostly for guests, until finally an American, 
one of the smartest representatives of New- 
port's smart set, asked for an introduction to 
them at the Italian opera, came and sat in 
their box at Covent Garden and made them 
promise that they would come and bring Mr. 
Detrimental and pay him a week-end visit at 
a fixed date in August at his Newport villa. 
The telegraphic cables flashed across the 



1 1 2 VLTRA'FASHIONABLES 

Atlantic to the States the accounts of Mrs. 
and Miss Detrimental's gowns and gems and 
of the titled personages who were their guests 
at the opera. But Mrs. Detrimental was now 
longing to achieve American triumphs on 
American soil. 

Lord and Lady Down-in-the-Heel. 

Mrs. Detrimental was eager to lease Mar- 
ble House, Newport, for July and August at 
the price of a king's ransom, but her secretary 
and social mentor, whose judgment had all 
along proven well-nigh infallible, frowned 
the proposition down in toto. ^'Do not commit 
yourself to taking a cottage at Newport until 
you are sure of your ground, Madame. Go to 
Newport in a yacht and stay on the yacht." 

Mrs. Detrimental urges Lord and Lady 
Down-in-the-Heel to go over to the States 
with them, but they both obstinately refuse 
even to accept an invitation to Newport for 
August, if a yacht should be sent over ex- 
pressly for them. Sub rosa they have heard 
a thing or two from the States by way of down 
on the Continent, and now that they have got 



OF AMERICA 113 

a breach or two in their castle walls repaired 
and Milady has acquired several changes of 
raiment which could no longer be termed 
dowdy, they are starting in to kick over the 
traces even in London, for people are begin- 
ning to chafif them about "Detrimental" 
money. 

Mrs. Detrimental, nothing daunted, secures 
as lieutenants for the Newport August cam- 
paign two young unmarried noblemen of the 
British peerage, and her husband hires and 
puts into commission an elephantine yacht — 
the largest ever built on American soil. They 
arrive at the City by the Sea, to accept the 
invitation extended to them in London, and 
now formally renewed for a few days' visit at 
a villa of the creme de la creme of the ultra- 
smart set on Ochre Point. Invitations have 
been sent out for a formal dinner in their 
honor. The response is cordial and entire. 

The dinner passes ofif joyously, neither 
Astors nor Vanderbilts present, to be sure, but 
others of the "quality'' of almost equal cachet. 
But as soon as the men are left to their post 
prandial cigars, the women en masse turn their 
backs upon Mrs. and Miss Detrimental, who 



114 l^L TRA-FASHIONABLES 

are left to examine portfolios of water colors, 
photographic albums, or to study the move- 
ments of the heavenly bodies. 

^'Can't you see through it all? Mr. , 

our host, has some property he wants to work 
off on the Detrimentals," one of the smart 
guests was afterward overheard whispering in 
the ladies' dressing-room. 

^We are being paid off in our own coin," 
Miss Detrimental muttered to her mother. 
^Why under the canopy did you go into all 
that pilavering with those women, pretending 
we had been in the deepest mourning for more 
than five years before we went abroad, to try 
to patch up our not knowing certain people in 
society? Those women took in at a glance 
that we did not belong to their world. Any- 
how, Dad could buy and sell out any half 
dozen of those families at the dinner," Miss 
Detrimental added, in a vain effort to cloak 
her discomfiture. 

The Detrimentals have received a shoulder- 
ing of more icy coldness than was ever dealt 
them in Paris, or even their own native habitat. 
For days afterward invitations came pouring 
in for the two noblemen, their guests, but none 



OF AMERICA 115 

for the hostesses. Even these members of the 
British peerage cannot stand the denouement, 
as there is an undercurrent of ridicule at their 
own expense on the part of the flippant, and 
they beg Mr. Detrimental to have the yacht 
pull up anchor for Narragansett Pier, Long 
Branch, or even Coney Island. In the days of 
Aunty Paran Stevens' social exploiting, or of 
the first fancy dress ball given by the Willie 
K. Vanderbilts, the abstract fact of having 
two such members of the British peerage 
as Mrs. Detrimental's guests aboard one's 
yacht would have brought half of Newport 
to terms of capitulation. But times have 
changed. Certain members of the New- 
port smart set actually patronize noblemen 
sometimes nowadays. 

Mr. Detrimental, deeply chagrined at his 
wife and daughter's defeat in Newport waters 
two years before, more than half the time in 
the interim having been passed by them 
abroad, now ordered a palatial yacht of his 
own built and again it*lies at anchor in New- 
port harbor. This time Lord and Lady Down- 
in-the-Heel, who are more hard up than ever 
before, and have a goodly visiting list of New- 



1 1 6 UL TRA^FASHIONABLES 

port cottages, have deigned to be guests of 
honor on the Detrimental yacht, Milord hav- 
ing consented to accept some sort of partner- 
ship in the head of the family's mines, and the 
husband of a pronounced Newport society 
leader a highly lucrative deal in the stock. A 
patent medicine cotillion is to be given aboard 
the yacht, with all sorts of patent nostrums 
doing little stunts, and with an extraordinary 
and most sensational vaudeville for a finale 
costing thousands of dollars. 

The invitations are issued solely by Lord 
and Lady Down-in-the-Heel, aided somewhat 
by the smart Newport family who had made 
money in Mr. Detrimental's mine. The Det- 
rimentals are the guests of their own guests 
that evening on board their own yacht. 



In at the Death. 

Fewer than half of the three hundred invita- 
tions sent out by Lord and Lady Down-in-the- 
Heel and the cottage queen of the mode for 
the patent medicine cotillion on board the 
Detrimental yacht were accepted, the fact of 



OF AMERICA 117 

Lord Down-in-the-Heel's having come upon 
a Newport cottager for a loan of a hundred 
thousand dollars to keep bailififs and sheriffs 
at bay on the other side not tending to swell 
the number of acceptances for this spectacular 
fete. Not an Astor, Ogden Mills or Vanderbilt 
was present, but a goodly number of their 
friends, especially of the younger set, honored 
the occasion, thinking the Detrimentals would 
be '^great fun" and there would be plenty of 
Ruinart. 

As for Mrs. Detrimental, the pleasure was 
never hers of meeting those goddesses en- 
shrined in her heart as the chief end of exist- 
ence to know — Mrs. Ogden Mills and her 
daughters, Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Cornelius 
Vanderbilt and the Gerrys and Goelets, for a 
social honor of which she little dreamed was 
in store for her a few days later — she died at 
Newport and was laid away in an ultra-smart 
grave, with a glimpse of Marble House in the 
dim horizon! 

But her daughter. Miss Detrimental, who 
never lost her head and whose life did not go 
out in fireworks, lived to compel all these 
social oligarchs to receive her by marrying one 



1 1 8 UL TRA-FASHIONABLES 

of the most courted and powerfully connected 
men of the spectacular ''150/' having virtually 
settled upon him a couple of millions by ante- 
nuptial contract. 



FINIS. 



C 310 88 



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